In Five Years

Searle’s second novel (The Dinner List) ponders the question: Where do you see yourself in five years? Dannie Kohan is a corporate lawyer with an orderly life. She knows the right time to focus on work, get engaged, or buy a condo. But one night she wakes up five years into the future, glimpsing a life completely altered. She meets the man in her vision four years later—he’s her best friend’s boyfriend—and desperately tries to shift the trajectory of what she thinks is about to happen. But the author throws in a big twist: The story is about life, love, friendship, fate, and free will, and what Dannie experienced five years earlier isn’t as clear as she’d thought. The turmoil of Dannie’s love life and, more important, her friendship with best friend Bella, shape this tale of a driven, logical woman faced with emotions she’s never felt before.