In Five Years

In Five Years is a novel by Rebecca Serle. It was published in March 2020 and became a New York Times bestseller. It was also chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club pick. It is categorized as a love story but subverts the premise by focusing on platonic love between its heroine and her best friend. The novel has been widely praised for its clever twist, its focus on the love between two lifelong friends, and its insightful discussion of loss.

Plot Summary

Dannie Kohan is a corporate lawyer with a fiancé, a sparkling best friend, and a job she loves. After her brother’s death in a car accident when she was 12, Dannie developed a need for control, discipline, and preparation. She lives her life by a set of guidelines that she believes guide a person towards the right kind of life. On the night of her engagement, she experiences a brief period of time that will occur exactly five years in the future; in it, her life is completely unrecognizable, from the apartment she lives in to the man she is with. The intensity of the feeling she experiences with this man unsettles her, and she puts it out of her mind. Its impact is evident, however, in her repeated delays in planning and holding a wedding.

When the same man appears in her life four and a half years later, she is confronted with the truth of the future she saw. There is a new complication, however: The man is her best friend’s new boyfriend, Aaron Gregory. Desperate to avoid the future she saw, Dannie reacts hastily: She is initially disapproving of Aaron, discourages her best friend, Bella, from buying the apartment she saw in her premonition, and rushes to set a date for the wedding she’s been putting off for over four years.

David, Dannie’s fiancé, is happy about the wedding but cautious after the many times Dannie has changed the date or backed out of planning. He is a good man who loves Dannie, but they live distant, separate lives that Dannie sees as investments in the future they are trying to build. Most of the action of the novel occurs in the final six months of the five years the title references, as Dannie confronts the potential of a future she did not plan for and seeks to avoid it.

The novel takes a turn when Bella tells Dannie that she believes she may be pregnant. A drugstore pregnancy test confirms her suspicion, and she happily begins buying baby supplies and preparing the nursery. A doctor’s appointment reveals that, rather than being pregnant, Bella has stage three ovarian cancer, a disease with a roughly 50% survival rate. As Bella undergoes treatment, Dannie’s control issues reveal underlying tensions in their relationship. Frustrated with how overbearing she is, Bella tells Dannie that she doesn’t want her to attend her chemotherapy appointments anymore. Over a period of several weeks, they do not speak at all. Their separation forces Dannie to confront and interrogate many assumptions she’s had about herself and her relationships with others.

In the later stages of Bella’s illness, David confronts Dannie about their engagement, and she admits that she doesn’t love him the way he deserves to be loved. Shortly after, Bella reveals that she bought the apartment from the premonition and decorated it for Dannie to live in. After Bella’s death and memorial service, Dannie and Aaron return to the apartment, and the night plays out the way she saw it in her dream. However, Dannie now knows that the overwhelming feeling she felt with Aaron was not love for him, but rather grief for Bella.