Five First Chances

Jost tugs at the heartstrings in her tearjerker debut. Lou’s life is at loose ends when she attends a friend-of-a-friend’s wake. She met the deceased, Nick, a handful of times but never really got to know him. Then—thanks to an unexplained time slip—Lou gets five chances to rewrite her relationship with Nick by returning to their first meeting, a chance encounter at a bar. In the first, teacher-in-training Lou and PE teacher Nick keep things strictly platonic—and Lou ends up right back where she started, grieving for Nick. Next time, the pair form a tighter bond. Then they become a couple but split up because of Lou’s premonitions of Nick’s cancer diagnosis. Then Lou makes sure Nick catches his diagnosis early on. With each successive reliving, Lou’s desperation to keep Nick alive and by her side increases, and readers will feel just as frantic for these two to get their happy ending. Anyone who has ever wished for a do-over will see themselves in Jost’s poignant tale of love lost and found. Agent: Liv Maidment, Madeleine Milburn. (Apr.)