A quiet weekend with a novel about plans and the future

There are evenings when the garden is put to bed, the kitchen is tidy, and a person wants one story to fill the hours until sleep. This paperback novel suits that evening. It follows a woman who has planned her life down to the number and then sees five years ahead for a single hour. It is a gentle, absorbing read.

In Five Years is a novel by Rebecca Serle, published by Atria Books on March 2, 2021, and the edition here is a 288 page paperback. It was a New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America book club pick. The setup is the one the description gives. Dannie Kohan is a lawyer who runs her life by numbers and plans. After a job interview that goes as well as she could hope, and a marriage proposal she accepts the same day, she falls asleep content. She wakes in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger and a different man beside her. She spends exactly one hour there, five years on, then wakes again in her own home just before midnight, unable to put that hour out of her mind.

The book sets two temperaments side by side. Dannie trusts schedules and outcomes, while her lifelong best friend Bella believes in fate and keeps life loose. Out of that contrast the novel works on a few questions: how much of a life can be arranged, what a person does with knowledge she never asked for, and what friendship and loss do to a plan. Booklist said it takes a familiar romantic setup and turns it into something deeper, and the publisher’s own line promises a love story that is not the expected one. This note says nothing more about where it goes, because the pleasure of the book depends on not knowing.

It suits a reader who likes order herself and has felt it wobble. That might be after a move, a new job, an engagement or a loss, or in the quiet after a long busy season. It also suits someone who wants friendship to carry as much weight as romance. Bustle praised the way Serle speaks to the anxiety of making a new road and the courage to start over. A reader who wants strict logic about time travel may find the premise more emotional than rigorous. That is a judgment from the description and the reviews, not something measured.

As a read, it is short and quick. Chloe Benjamin, the novelist, called it a book to finish in one sitting, and at 288 pages in paperback that is realistic on a free weekend. Reviewers describe the prose as propulsive, with humor, tenderness and sadness mixed together, and the New York Journal of Books notes a touch of the mystical. Expect to feel something along the way. Whether it lands is partly a matter of taste.

What tends to stay is the question in the description itself, where you see yourself in five years and who is in the picture. A book like this sends a reader back to ordinary things, the kitchen table, a friend’s name in the phone, with a little more attention than before.