Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063239920. One Day meets Groundhog Day, in this heartwarming and emotionally poignant novel about a stressed woman who must relive the same day over and over, keeping her family and work life from imploding as she attempts to spare her husband from an unfortunate fate. It is an ordinary Monday and harried London literary agent Emma is flying out of the door as usual. Preoccupied with work and her ever growing to-do list, she fails to notice her lovely husband Dan seems bereft, her son can barely meet her eye, and her daughter won’t go near her. Even the dog seems sad. She is far too busy, buried deep in her phone; social media alerts pinging; clients messaging with “emergencies”; keeping track of a dozen WhatsApp groups about the kids’ sports, school, playdates, all of it. Her whole day is frantic—what else is new—and as she rushes back through the door for dinner, Dan is still upset. They fight, and he walks out, desolate, dragging their poor dog around the block. Just as she realizes it is their anniversary and she has forgotten, again, she hears the screech of brakes. Dan is dead. The next day Emma wakes up… and Dan is alive. And it’s Monday again. And again. And again. Emma tries desperately to change the course of fate by doing different things each time she wakes up: leaving WhatsApp, telling her boss where to get off, writing to Dan, listening to her kids, reaching out to forgotten friends, getting drunk and buying out Prada. But will Emma have the chance to find herself again, remember what she likes about her job, reconnect with her children, love her husband? Will this be enough to change the fate they seem destined for? A moving “What if” story of what it is to be a woman in the modern world—never feeling we’re getting it quite right—about learning to slow down and appreciate life that is sure to resonate with women’s fiction fans.
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I needed a book to break me from a string of disappointing books and this one was it!
Emma has a very stressful life and she doesn’t quite realize the impact that it’s having on her until she has to relive the same day… over. And over. And over. And over again. And every single time, her husband Dan dies at 10:17pm. It doesn’t matter what she does, he dies and she wakes up and relives the same day.
This was an absolutely beautiful & heart wrenching story. I loved Emma’s growth in the book & how it felt SO real. This wasn’t her living the same day just a few times and waking up & realizing what needed to be done to fix it. This was a growth of over what was comparable to several months.
The ending was hard for me to process but it was so perfect to the story. While I felt like I knew how it ended, I hated not having the 100% certainty.
The story was captivating and never hit a dull or slow moment - right from the start I knew that this would be a book that I would absolutely love. And could see myself read again.
Thank you NetGalley and William Morrow for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.