Second Chance Books

A woman chasing her family's financial salvation stumbles into a secondhand bookstore and straight back into the arms of the boy she thought she got over but never stopped loving.

Nell has always been the one leaning on her older sister, trusting her to keep things steady. But when her brother-in-law disappears, leaving her pregnant sister buried in bills, Nell decides it's her turn to step up. She takes on a commission that could fix everything: convince the eccentric owner of a beloved secondhand bookstore to sell his property. It's a practical plan, clean and necessary—until she walks through the door and finds Thomas Whelan, her childhood crush and the person she's spent years trying not to think about.

When the bookstore's owner offers Nell a job sorting through the shop's overstuffed shelves—extra income she can't afford to refuse—Nell takes it, telling herself it's only temporary. But between long afternoons in the stacks, interviewing the members of a lively (and slightly unruly) book club, and the steady presence of Tom while she takes him on practice dates so he can woo the girl he likes, the bookstore begins to feel less like a job and more like something she can't lose. Because if Tom is so set on someone else, why does he keep looking at Nell like she's the one he wants? And why does wish she could want him back?

What starts as a plan to dismantle the shop becomes something far more complicated as Nell finds herself growing attached—to the bookstore, to the people who gather there, and to the version of her life that begins to take shape within its walls.

Second Chance Books is a cozy, dual-POV romance about the love that literature makes possible: between people, between strangers who become family, and between a young woman and the life she didn't know she was allowed to want.