Rebecca Serle’s 2026 novel, Once and Again, is a work of contemporary fiction that blends domestic drama with magical realism. The story centers on Lauren Novak, whose family has a unique matrilineal inheritance: Each woman is born with a single-use silver ticket that allows her to undo a past event. Lauren has spent her adult life believing her mother used her ticket to save her father’s life, a secret that has shaped her family’s dynamic. Now, as Lauren grapples with her own struggles with infertility and a strained marriage, she must consider the weight of her own unused ticket. The novel explores themes of The Illusory Nature of Second Chances, Intergenerational Inheritance of Trauma and Resilience, and The Tension Between Control and Acceptance.

Author Rebecca Serle is known for a distinct narrative style that inserts a single high-concept or speculative element into an otherwise realistic contemporary setting to explore profound emotional questions. This approach is evident in her previous New York Times bestselling novels, including In Five Years, which features a premonition of the future, and One Italian Summer, in which a woman meets a younger version of her deceased mother. Her work, often selected for major book clubs such as Reese’s Book Club, consistently examines themes of love, grief, and the complex relationship between fate and choice. Serle also developed her young adult series Famous in Love into a television show.

This guide is based on the 2026 Atria Books hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions of infertility and pregnancy loss, sexual content, antisemitism, violence, and illness or death.

Plot Summary

Lauren Novak, a 37-year-old accountant in West Hollywood, lies awake early in the morning, waiting for her husband, Leo, to text that his flight has landed safely in New York, where he’s interviewing for a job as director of photography on a new television show. Lauren has never been able to sleep while he is in the air—a fear rooted in the trauma she’s carried since her father died in a car crash on Mulholland Drive, in Los Angeles, when she was 15, and her mother brought him back to life.

The women in Lauren’s family each inherit a silver ticket—a single-use do-over that allows them to change any moment in their past. The origin story of the silver tickets starts with Lauren’s great-grandmother, Irina, who grew up in Odessa, Ukraine, in the 1920s. One day, when Irina was seven years old, she delivered shoes to a reclusive woman named Hinda. When Hinda could not pay, Irina gifted her the shoes and, in return, Hinda gave Irina a small wooden box containing the silver ticket—a tool “for undoing the past” (11). The next morning, Irina’s father was seized during a raid by Bolshevik forces and presumed dead. Irina pressed the ticket between her palms, thought of the day before, and was transported back. She warned her family of the raid, and her father survived. With each new woman born into Irina’s line, a fresh ticket appeared: one for Lauren’s grandmother Sylvia, one for her mother, Marcella, and one for Lauren herself, stored in a safe at the family’s oceanfront home in Malibu.

Marcella used her ticket to undo Dave’s fatal car accident, then fell into a severe depression. Two months later, Lauren found Marcella slumped in the shower and demanded answers. Marcella and Sylvia sat Lauren down and explained that Dave had died and Marcella had taken it back. Lauren identifies this as the moment she became an adult. From then on, the three women orbited Dave protectively, guarding against any danger. Lauren has never told Leo about the tickets or the accident.

Lauren and Leo have been trying to have a baby since before they got married. After many visits to fertility clinics, Lauren was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure. They have completed six intrauterine inseminations and four egg retrievals for IVF without producing a single embryo. Their savings are depleted. Exhausted by the process, Leo keeps asking how much more pain and disappointment they should endure. Lauren cannot bring herself to stop.

Leo gets the New York job and proposes that Lauren spend the summer at the Malibu beach house while they rent out their bungalow for extra income. Lauren agrees, but tension flares when she mentions the fertility clinic. Leo says bluntly that they should stop trying for a baby. Lauren feels betrayed, and a rift settles between them.

Lauren moves in with her family in Malibu, stepping back into their familiar dynamic. Dave, a family lawyer and lifelong surfer who underwent open-heart surgery for coronary artery disease at 39, is effusive and warm. Marcella is practical and anxious, perpetually worried about Dave’s safety. Sylvia, nearly 92, is irreverent, barefoot, and mysterious about her past.

On the beach, Lauren encounters Stone, the boy she dated from age 15 to 25 when Stone moved to Colorado to start his own business. Stone is back in Malibu because his stepmother, Bonnie, who raised him from age six, is dying of cancer. Lauren has not surfed since she and Stone broke up because the water reminded her too painfully of their relationship. Encouraged by Dave, she pulls her old board from storage and paddles out at dawn. She catches a wave and is overwhelmed by the joy of feeling totally present in the moment. She and Stone begin surfing together most mornings.

Their connection deepens. Lauren visits Bonnie, who is frail but still warm and sharp-minded. She privately wrestles with guilt over whether she should use her ticket to help. After a family dinner in Malibu, Stone and Lauren sneak out to the Greek, a crumbling, abandoned house on the beach where they used to go as teenagers. Stone confesses he wonders if he ruined things by leaving. Lauren blurts out that she cannot have a baby, the first time she has said it out loud.

One day, Lauren notices Dave struggling to lift his surfboard. He confesses privately that one of his bypasses has closed, and he has been experiencing angina—chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart. He has not told Marcella. Lauren tries repeatedly to reach Leo, but he doesn’t answer. She realizes that today is their third wedding anniversary.

When Bonnie dies, Stone arrives at Lauren’s door, heavy with grief, and Lauren drives him to the Trancas Country Mart parking lot—the same place they used to park as teenagers. In the car, grief and longing collide, and they have sex.

Afterward, Lauren is seized by guilt. She listens to a voicemail from Leo saying he misses her. Racing upstairs, she opens the safe and takes out her silver ticket. She uses it, rewinding time to before the affair, before the summer at the beach. The ticket is gone.

Lauren wakes in the bungalow on the Friday she was supposed to drive to Malibu. Instead, she flies to New York. Leo meets her at baggage claim, holding a sign that reads “My Wife.” In his rented Brooklyn apartment, Lauren tells him he was right about stopping fertility treatment. She says their life together is the only one she wants. Leo is moved to tears. Their summer in New York is blissful. Lauren learns from her parents that, in this reset timeline, Stone has persuaded Bonnie to participate in a new experimental trial, giving them more time, though Bonnie’s condition eventually worsens again.

Six weeks later, Marcella calls: Dave is in the hospital after a cardiac arrest. At Cedars-Sinai, doctors explain that the bypasses from decades ago are failing and surgery is risky. Marcella looks at Lauren with a question in her eyes, hoping Lauren will use her ticket. Lauren tells her it is gone. Marcella is furious, then devastated.

Instead of returning upstairs, Marcella leads Lauren outside to the parking structure and tells her the truth. It was not Dave who died in the car accident. It was Lauren. She and Dave were driving home from a volleyball game when the crash occurred. Marcella used her ticket to save her daughter, not her husband, and pretended Dave had died because she could not bear to tell a 15-year-old that she herself had died. Dave always knew the truth.

Lauren finally understands her mother’s lifelong anxiety: Marcella was never afraid because she had saved Dave and could not do it again. She was afraid because she had saved Lauren, and Dave’s weakening heart was a crisis she would eventually be powerless to prevent.

That night, Sylvia reveals she never used her own ticket. She tells the story of Bobby Montgomery, a man she loved in 1960s Las Vegas who disappeared, and was later found dead as a result of his mob connections. Sylvia resolved to use the ticket to save Bobby, but when she discovered she was pregnant with Marcella and felt her kick, she chose to let life move forward. She hands her unused ticket to Lauren—a gift to do with as she chooses.

Lauren rushes to the hospital and proposes going back a decade to catch Dave’s heart condition earlier. Dave refuses. He doesn’t want to erase the last 10 years, the happiest of his life. He tells Lauren that if they go back a decade, she won’t have Leo. Lauren accepts his decision.

Lauren meets up with Stone one last time. He confesses he still has feelings for her. She tells him they are romanticizing what could have been and that life moves only forward. At the bungalow, she calls Leo, who is already flying home to be with them. When he arrives, Lauren tells him the truth about sleeping with Stone, without mentioning the ticket, wanting to take full accountability for the mistake. Leo is hurt but says he wants to try to forgive her. They sit side by side, hands gripped, present in the pain together.

Three years later, Lauren and Leo have a son, Damien, conceived through donor eggs funded by Sylvia’s money. They endured a six-month separation and a slow reconciliation before choosing this path together. Sylvia passed away the previous September at home, surrounded by family. Dave underwent successful heart surgery and is healthy enough to know his grandson. Damien was not born with a silver ticket, which the family views as the breaking of a cycle. At Damien’s first birthday party at the Malibu house, Lauren accidentally burns the cake. She opens Sylvia’s old cookie jar and finds Sylvia’s ticket at the bottom. She presses it into her palm, determined to get the cake right this time.