Once and Again
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 10 Mar 2026
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- 14,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Serle, the author behind “heartbreaking, redemptive, and authentic” (Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author) modern classic In Five Years, returns with an unforgettable tale of a family of women with an astonishing gift: the ability to redo one moment in their lives.
The women of the Novak family were each born with a gift: they can, just once, turn back time.
Lauren has known since she was fifteen that her mother Marcella saved Lauren’s father from a deadly car accident. Dave is alive and happy, and out on the Malibu waves. But ever since, Marcella, her power spent, has lived in fear of what she won’t be able to reverse. Her own mother, Sylvia, is her polar opposite: a free-spirited iconoclast with a glamorous past she only hints at. Lauren has spent her life between these two role models—and waiting for her own catastrophe to strike.
Then one summer, Lauren’s husband takes a job in New York and she moves back to Broad Beach Road, back into her childhood home on the shores of Malibu. Lauren looks forward to surfing with her dad again and perhaps repairing an unspoken fracture in her relationship with her mother. What she doesn’t expect is for the boy next to door to return home as well: Stone, Lauren’s first love, who broke her heart nearly a decade before.
As Lauren falls into familiar patterns, with her family and, more dangerously, Stone, she finds herself thinking about all the choices, large and small, that have brought her to this moment. And wondering, finally, if one of them should be undone.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Rebecca Serle ponders some of life’s greatest uncertainties in this emotive story of family and identity. Carefree, bohemian Sylvia is quite different from her careful, fastidious daughter, Marcella, while Marcella’s daughter, Lauren, seeks to find a balance between the two. But all three have something in common: a magical family gift they call “the silver ticket” that enables each of them, just once in their lives, to reverse time. Serle treats this supernatural element with graceful restraint, using it to explore the very different ways these women navigate their lives and express their love. Sylvia’s history with the ticket is richly mysterious. Marcella has become even more anxious since using hers to save her husband’s life. And Lauren is struggling with infertility and a suffering marriage when she unexpectedly reconnects with her childhood sweetheart, forcing her to reconsider her future—perhaps, by changing her past. Once and Again is a resonant exploration of what it means to live with our choices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At birth, the women of the Novak family are given a silver ticket that allows them one chance to turn back time, in this disappointing tale from Serle (In Five Years). When Lauren's mother was 15, she used hers to save Lauren's father from a deadly car crash, and her mother has worried about his ailing heart ever since, knowing she's used up her only chance to save him. Lauren, who grew up surfing with her father near their modest Malibu house, is 37 and dealing with expensive and grueling fertility treatments. While Leo, her husband of three years, spends a summer in New York City to advance his film career, Lauren visits her childhood home with her parents and grandmother. There, she takes up surfing again and rekindles a romance with an old flame, Stone. Feeling disconnected from herself and pushing Leo further away, she wonders if perhaps there is a past choice she can undo. The author introduces heavy themes of family bonds and fertility struggles, but the story is undone by clunky characterizations—especially that of Stone, who's described as "humble" and vain in the span of a paragraph—and by an ending that feels unfaithful to the plot. Serle's clever concept doesn't quite translate into magic on the page.
