In Five Years: A Novel

Rebecca Serle

Mar 2020 · Simon and Schuster · Narrated by Megan Hilty

About this audiobook

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A Good Morning America, FabFitFun, and Marie Claire Book Club Pick

“In Five Years is as clever as it is moving, the rare read-in-one-sitting novel you won’t forget.” —Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists

​Perfect for fans of Me Before You and One Day—a striking, powerful, and moving love story following an ambitious lawyer who experiences an astonishing vision that could change her life forever.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Dannie Kohan lives her life by the numbers.

She is nothing like her lifelong best friend—the wild, whimsical, believes-in-fate Bella. Her meticulous planning seems to have paid off after she nails the most important job interview of her career and accepts her boyfriend’s marriage proposal in one fell swoop, falling asleep completely content.

But when she awakens, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. Dannie spends one hour exactly five years in the future before she wakes again in her own home on the brink of midnight—but it is one hour she cannot shake. In Five Years is an unforgettable love story, but it is not the one you’re expecting.

Ratings and reviews

Too silly to continue? I'm a quarter of the way in and undecided as to whether I should spend any more time with this. Let's just say that Bella's "struggles" are a bit ridiculous in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, there are things I would be stressed about if I were in her shoes, but she doesn't really pay much attention to those things; instead she hyper-focuses and overthinks other--to me rather unimportant--things... We also follow very different decision-making processes apparently.

I thought this would be a cute romance that moves between the past and the present via the main character's dreams. Something similar to Last Night In Soho. Turns out it's more like "let me go behind her back and be attracted to my best friend's soulmate while she's dying of cancer". Like??? Is this supposed to make it feel "tempting" and "tabo"? Cause there's nothing sexy about this. They literally kiss chapters after the lead says he's supposedly in love with her best friend WHILE SHE'S STILL ALIVE and then have sex the night of her funeral 🙃 Not a fun read. I think all this book really taught me was some people have frighteningly different opinions on friendship and loyalty. I gave it the extra star however case I think the woman who voiced the audio was phenomenal.

Bittersweet, and not particularly uplifting, but well-written with just the right amount of visual detail, and an OUTSTANDING narrator. It was interesting to explore the conflation of grief and passion, and how a premonition can play out in unexpected ways.

About the author

Rebecca Serle is the New York Times bestselling author of Expiration Dates, One Italian Summer, In Five Years, The Dinner List, and the young adult novels The Edge of Falling and When You Were Mine. Serle also developed the hit TV adaptation Famous in Love, based on her YA series of the same name. She is a graduate of USC and The New School and lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Find out more at RebeccaSerle.com.