Spotlight & Giveaway: Five First Chances by Sarah Jost

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Sarah Jost to HJ!

Hi Sarah and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Five First Chances!

 
Hi, thank you so much for having me!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Five First Chances is a contemporary time-loop love story. It follows Lou, a Swiss expat trying to make a life for herself in the UK. At the beginning of the book, she is at her lowest; attending the funeral of Nick, a friend of a friend, with a job that isn’t going too well and no real connection to the people around her. When she learns that her ex is engaged, she crashes into a time-seizure that sends her back two years ago when she might have missed the chance to change her life… As she goes back, she grows and learns and slowly realises what it takes to turn up for the people who matter, and what love stories are truly worth fighting for.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

My favourite is the first line of the book: ‘Baby elephants can die of loneliness.’ It sets the tone for an emotional read… It is also the line people remember, and the baby elephants do end up playing a big part in the love story between the two main characters. I don’t want to spoil their role in this – if that sounds intriguing to you, please do read the novel!

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

The book deals with difficult themes but also brings in humour, effortless chemistry and lots of quirky animal antics (expect elephants, otters and capybaras!). The zoo is an important setting for some of the scenes as they repeat over the two year loop. There are also a couple of despicable male characters (inspired by some of my own dates!) that every woman who has read the book has recognised and loved to loathe.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

It’s hopefully not too much of a spoiler to say that Nick is Lou’s big love story in the book. It takes Lou a while until she realises this though. She is attracted to Nick because 1) he’s a nice guy 2) he’s hot, in a laid back mountaineer kind of way, with messy longish hair and biceps and a melt-your-heart grin 3) have I mentioned he’s a nice guy? And I mean ‘nice’ in the best sense of the term. He listens to her, he’s funny, kind, laid-back… all the things she is struggling to be at the beginning. She will find out later what demons he is keeping at bay. As for Nick… Lou acts like herself around him from the start, because she has her sights on someone else. He recognises her bravery, finds her cute and endearing… They also connect through silly things like their love-annoyance at otters. Ultimately, they both bring out the best of each other. And there’s a lot of physical chemistry there.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I cried a lot writing some scenes of the book, but I don’t want to spoil the ending. I’ll share a snippet of a scene that I was very moved writing, when Lou finds Nick again in one of the loops. I think they go through so much, with the repeated time loops, that it makes the pay back so much better when they do find each other!
I push my own way through the crowd to the gasps of people who witnessed the incident. I have no idea whether it’s me Nick is looking for, whether he’ll stop for me, and it takes all the time in the world, I walk through all the many memories of tonight until, at last, as a giggling couple move out of the way, I find myself standing right in front of him, and he sees me.
He sees me.
For a second, he doesn’t say anything, and I fear that he’s going to walk around me, but he stops.
‘Lou?’

Readers should read this book….

If they’re up for an emotional read, a slow burn with a big emotional pay off. Readers have described it as ‘beautiful’ and ‘heart-wrenching’ (thank you, dear readers!). It is the kind of book that, I hope, makes you think about your own life and encourages you to seize your chances and take stock of what really matters to you. Most readers end up fancying Nick as well!

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I’m currently working on my second novel for Sourcebooks, which will be coming out in Fall 2024. It is partially set in a gorgeous, mysterious castle in France, about friendship, imposter syndrome and the emotions we all feel when looking at art. Like Five First Chances, it is contemporary with an element of magic; a slightly darker tone, but of course it is a love story as well, and features a main female character learning to reclaim her agency to protect the people who matter to her.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A print copy of FIVE FIRST CHANCES by Sarah Jost

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of your past? What would you change? Do you think the risk of time travel would be worth the potential reward?

 
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Excerpt from Five First Chances:

Monday, July 15, 2019
Baby elephants can die of loneliness.
I’m hiding at the darker end of the room, in this village pub erected so close to the church that either would crumble without the other. I sneaked out after the service; now, at the wake, while I wait anxiously for somebody to come and ask how I knew Nick (I didn’t, not really), I’m reviewing my life and regrets, basking in the proximity of death like a chicken roasting in its own juices. Compressing the past four years of my life into my brain, trying to figure out where it’s all gone wrong.
“Time is a funny thing,” I tell Yuki when she returns. She went to offer her condolences to the family, all huddled together in the bay window.
She leans next to me against the bar. The voices around us are muffled, the carpet dappled in burning puddles of sun. There’s a garden out there, full of grass and flowers and cats, but it must have been deemed too hot, too cheery for the occasion. Or nobody could stand to be judged by cats today, and I can’t blame them.
Yuki checks her glass, which still stands empty where she left it. Was I supposed to get her another drink? Be her funeral wingwoman? She sighs as she orders, the tips of her fingers drumming on the bar. Her nail polish is unusually flaky, like the paint of those neglected houses by the seaside. That’s all I seem to be able to see in England nowadays: the crumbling plaster, the burst fast-­food bags, the electric wires threatening to come loose.
“Yeah, I know what you mean, Lou,” she says. “If only we could go back and see Nick again.”
“Of course,” I say. Yuki’s eyes are deep, slightly swollen, ringed with eyeliner gone blurry. “I mean, this is such a tragedy.”
“But? Go on, I know you have something on your mind.”
“I—­I can’t stop thinking I’ve messed up my life.”
“Ah, mate. You and me both.”
When she called me last week, saying her friend Nick had died, asking me to go with her to the funeral, I was surprised. We hadn’t been in touch much the past two years, since she’d put an end to our flat share to move in with her best friend, Lucy. We had gotten along well when we lived together, had been lucky given the randomness of our pairing, but it had fizzled out.
I was desperate when I met Yuki. The end of my teacher training year was in sight, I’d gotten my first job, I had to leave university accommodation, and I was terrified of setting out by myself in a foreign country for the first time. I’d gone on SpareRoom, scrolling through a world of bachelor pads, rehabilitated cupboards, and dark bedrooms brimming with spooky dolls. When I found Yuki’s ad, I kept thinking there had to be a catch. Even after she’d let me into the neat top-­floor flat padded with soft furnishings, even after she’d called me mate and asked eagerly about types of fondue. We only lived together for a year, and I know now, retrospectively, that it was my best year in the UK. My best relationships always seem to be short.
During that out-­of-­the-­blue phone call, I remember hearing Yuki only faintly over the sound of a lawn mower, as if her voice itself, normally pure and confident, was being chopped up in small blades. “But you and Nick have friends in common,” I tried to argue, thinking of her clique from uni and work, their house parties and big nights out. Panicking at the thought of intruding where I didn’t belong. “I hardly knew him at all. Will Lucy not be there?”
“Lucy’s in Barcelona for work,” Yuki said. I could tell she was upset, and I’d never known her to be upset, not really. Her mood and direction were meant to be constant, like a shiny boat. “I’d like someone with me. Someone neutral.”
“Is it because I’m Swiss?” I joked.
“Lou. Please, matey. I don’t want to be there alone. My other friends will all have babies to wipe or whatever.”
So I said yes, and she seemed to want to say more but changed the subject, and we talked about how glad we were to be childless. It was like those old conversations we used to have, sunk into the numerous cushions of her sofa. It made me realize how much I had missed them.
I never had enough time to get to know Nick, however, which made the funeral today rather uncomfortable. As I sat in the hushed silence before the beginning of the service, in the rustle of tissues and quiet sobs, hiding my phone between my knees, I felt like one of my pupils, waiting to be caught out. The church was packed, and the doors had been wedged open to allow people to spill outside. There was an older lady, in some kind of hiking trousers and a chunky necklace, who had to stand by our pew; whoever she was, she must have known Nick better than I did. I was checking tribute messages on his social media, cramming homework, as it were. His grin on his profile picture was wide, his face handsome and relaxed. With his sun-­kissed hair tied back, his stubble, and his hoodie, he looked so wholesome, like he’d just been doing some casual rock climbing.
Nick Harper you legend can’t believe your gone. Rest in peace wherever u are
What a loss. Such a genuine and generous lad. Love to all the family. Will miss your smile so much, and all your wise advice. I’ll never forget your help xoxo
Nick, you always made us laugh. You were a wonderful colleague and teacher. We’ll all miss you so much here at St. Mary’s, Year 5 especially. Love and RIP
I ended up scrolling all the way back to two days after Nick’s death, when his sister, Charlotte, had written about the funeral on his page: Close friends and family only—­she clearly didn’t want to share it with the world. I clicked on her Instagram username, and there she was, sitting on a herringbone wooden floor, wrapped in a robe fluffy enough to have been spun by Cinderella’s mice, one arm hugging a Bernese mountain dog. I felt some envy for her life, the striking quality of it, her confidence, with huge additional shame for that envy, because she had just lost her brother.
Then Yuki elbowed me hard. “You’re not stalking Romain? I thought you’d stopped,” she scolded, looking over my shoulder, her intrusion bringing my thoughts right back to him. Not that I’d stopped thinking about him. Being at this funeral had made me realize that in all the time I’d been in England, I hadn’t met anyone who mattered as much to me as he did. The loneliness of this was suddenly unbearable, a dull ache I’d been living with and ignoring for years. When sitting in a church pew surrounded by mourners, I could no longer ignore it.
Romain wasn’t my first love, but he was the one that mattered. One of those people who comes along to rescue you from all your doubts and insecurities. With them, you find yourself standing in a new landscape, holding bricks and mortar and desperate to get building, and then, suddenly…a landslide. Something due to your own negligence; you didn’t protect your foundations, ignored the rough terrain, and all at once, you’re sucked into a gaping hole. When he broke up with me, back home in Switzerland, my grief spread to the landscape, to the towns and train stations where I might bump into him, to the cafés we’d sat in together. Everywhere I looked was haunted by what our relationship would never be. And it was my fault.
So in September 2015, I moved away to England, carrying his ghost with me in my suitcase, along with my brand-­new, optimistic, ten-­item wardrobe of reinvention. Leaving behind my sister, Marion, and my mother, who I thought were fine.
Romain sent me letters, making my heart leap every time I recognized his writing. I bent Yuki’s ears at first, even a year in. “Ah, Romain le writer, what a tristesse,” she would sympathize. Her fake French is the worst. She got a C in secondary school—­they all do here. Believe me, it’s not a gauge of quality. She pronounces his name Romaan; I’ve long stopped correcting her. There was comfort, though, in her acknowledging his existence, at a time when I thought I might have dreamt that we ever were together. Little by little, the distance seemed to work, the letters became more sporadic, and I stopped bringing him up, convincing myself I had moved on.
Except I’m looking back now, and I realize I haven’t progressed at all. I haven’t gotten over anything; I’ve been stuck in time.
“You know, we met Nick exactly two years ago on this day.” Yuki’s words bring me back to the present: the wake. She takes a big gulp of her fresh Diet Coke. I’m drinking lager, even if I know my stomach will be torn apart later with acidity and gas. I was hoping a pint would help me blend in, but the other women all appear to be drinking small glasses of white wine.
I turn to her. Her face is so sad, still, as if made of wax.
“Was that your birthday? At the Five Horseshoes?” I ask her. I only have vague memories of that night, a quick chat with Nick at the bar, perhaps about animals, which seems to be my only safe subject of conversation. Two years ago to this day; if I think back to where I was, things must have been looking up. I was just finishing my first year of teaching, and I was exhausted, but I remember excitement too. Yuki had moved out, but she had invited me to her birthday, and it looked like I was going to make it. I would become a real teacher, my new friendships might last the distance, it was summer…
“I saw you cried during the service,” Yuki says.
“Maybe. It was moving.”
I can’t tell her the truth. That I have stored a program I saw, the one about the lonely baby elephants, for these kinds of occasions. When I need something to attach my pain to and need it quickly.
I watched the program one evening after a particularly bad day at school, when one of the Year 10 boys had run out of the classroom and started sprinting around and around the building like a crazed firecracker while the rest of the class cheered him from the windows. There was a tiny orphan elephant that had to sleep under a blanket and grew too attached to his keeper. The keeper knew it wasn’t good; the calf loved him, but he would die if he didn’t make any elephant friends. During Nick’s eulogy, I allowed myself to spend some time there, in the vivid memory of the calf’s story. The way he looked so small under the giant blanket. How he struggled to know what to do once he met other orphans. After a while, I realized everybody around me was crying, and I was crying too.
“It’s so fucking tragic,” Yuki says, clearly referring to Nick’s death.
Funerals do this to you: they are endings but also beginnings. They point with awful clarity to the gaps in your own life. If things were looking up two years ago, that light has since dimmed. Now I’m thirty-­three years old, in a country that still feels foreign, living in a tiny soulless studio I can barely afford, students rioting as I teach them the French words for fruit and vegetables, my social life peppered with acquaintances and work colleagues who never quite become friends, my phone silent. Wishing it would all get better by itself, magically, with time.
What happened to me? How did it all slide downhill so slowly that I’m only now realizing the extent of the damage?
I look at Yuki’s profile, wondering whether she knows me well enough to explain it to me, taking in her bob of dyed blond hair, more frizzy than usual, the Japanese tattoo on her forearm hinting at some unspoken heritage, though I know from the official-­looking letters she received when we lived together that her legal name is Anna. “Are you okay?” I ask her.
She shrugs. I’m not sure where we stand anymore, what degree of intimacy we operate on. How to get back to what we once had, which I played down at the time. I keep looking at her, not knowing what I should say and saying nothing. And to make matters worse, Nick’s sister is watching us across the room, coming our way. She’ll interrogate me about my relationship with Nick and find out I have none. It will be awful.
I don’t know how I know this, but I do.
My brain goes into panic mode—­it is constantly involved in the anticipation of events. I play through my typical mishaps as if watching a film preview, to the point where I feel I’ve lived them already. Yuki used to say I was anxious, socially awkward, but even she doesn’t understand to what extent. I try to steady myself by gripping the bar, but it’s sticky with cider.
Italian has a word for the ring-­shaped print of your drink: culaccino. In the rising unease, I try it aloud.
“Culaccino. Nick’s sister is coming.”
“Is that a swear word? Didn’t know you spoke Italian too,” Yuki says.
I don’t speak Italian. I spent my Swiss childhood reading cereal boxes where everything was written in three languages. Perhaps that counts as trilingual here.
“She’s coming,” I repeat. Yuki clearly hasn’t grasped the gravity of the situation. I’m praying for her to get me out of it, perhaps fireman-­carry me out of the pub, but now she seems transfixed by Charlotte, who is closing in with calm purpose, silver bracelets clinking, as if she were Medusa and had turned Yuki to stone.
We’re utterly broken to let you know that Nick passed away on Wednesday, July 3. If you wish to pay tribute to him at this point in time, please do it here. We’ll leave his page running for a while. Don’t have the heart to pick up the phone at the moment, but thank you for your support.
“Hi again, Yuki,” Charlotte says, but she’s looking at me.
“Hi.” Yuki comes back to life, combs through her hair.
“Where’s your dog?” I blurt out before mortification hits. That’s what we call jumping from the cockerel to the donkey, sauter du coq à l’âne. I always do this when I’m embarrassed, put on the spot. That’s why, most of the time, it’s wiser for me not to do or say anything. Both Charlotte and Yuki startle, but Charlotte recovers first.
“Chomsky’s with his borrower.”
“Borrower?”
“Yes.” She’s clearly not willing to explain.
“He’s really gorgeous, and so are you. I mean your photos on Instagram…” Yuki says. I thought she didn’t like dogs.
“Thank you.”
There’s a silence, left on purpose, I think, for me to fill with something about Nick, but I’m petrified. I go through my brain but it has turned into Bircher muesli, and the longer the silence goes on, the more worried I become about saying the wrong thing. Yuki is of no use, and Charlotte is staring at me, while my eyes go from one to the other, not knowing where it’s safer to land.
“How did you know Nick?”
I can tell she’s been crying. Probably hasn’t stopped for days. Everything she does or says is controlled, but her angst is raw. This is love. And seeing it so publicly displayed, so pure, makes me dizzy with heartbroken longing.
“Louise used to be my flatmate,” Yuki finally says. “She’s a teacher too.”
Charlotte nods, but her eyes are cold. “I see.”
“Such a genuine and generous person,” I try. I hope she doesn’t realize that I’m quoting Facebook. I’m not even sure how to pronounce the word genuine.
“Yes, he was.”
I don’t know what else to say. I don’t have anything to offer. Baby elephants can die of loneliness. Baby elephants, the zoo. Capybaras. No, otters.
“I put you on the spot, didn’t I?” Charlotte throws in a clipped smile, and we stand there for a while longer as I try sentences in my head, then discard them. In the end, she says, “Well, it’s nice meeting new friends of Nick’s. I thought I knew them all. Bye, Yuki.”
She’s made her point. I shouldn’t be there, a spectator to other people’s pain. Both Yuki and I watch her turn around; she leaves us a perfume print in the air, jasmine or orange, something blossoming softly in the summer evening.
“The otters…”
This has come out of nowhere, even for me. But I’ve said something. Loud enough for Charlotte to turn and look back.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nick told me I should go to the zoo and check out the otters.” I stumble on my own accent, the words turning into pebbles in my mouth, a memory forming in my brain. Otters juggle pebbles, don’t they?
Charlotte softens, though. “He did love the zoo,” she says, chuckling to herself. “Weirdo.”
And she goes back to her family, wrapping her long arm around her mother’s shoulders, leaving me to wonder if Nick was the weirdo or if I am.
I order another pint and drink half of it, one tiny sip at a time, breathing through my nose. I must have gone through quite a lot of lager, I realize, as my head feels fuzzy. Yuki is still watching Charlotte’s back, leaning against the bar, her elbows pointing up behind her like angel’s wings.
“That’s such a Nick thing to do,” she smiles. “Trying to match you to your animal mascot.”
I shrug, briefly wondering how the memory materialized. “It must have been at your birthday. During that whole three minutes of small talk.”
Yuki leans over to me. “That night, at the Five Horseshoes…”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. A text. I go to retrieve it, but she stops me.
“For fuck’s sake, Lou, please listen.” Her intensity is such that I freeze. “Nick and I kissed. Or I think I kissed him. It’s so long ago, and I was drunk, a bit of a blur. Nobody else knows about it.”
“What…how?” Among the men and women Yuki has dated these past three years, nobody has stuck.
“Thing is, it was nothing.” She shrugs, leans back again, finishes her Diet Coke. Her fingers are trembling. A droplet of condensation runs down the glass, falls. “Really, really honestly, I hadn’t given it much thought, until he… I remember bumping into him in the smoking shelter. We spent ages there, and he helped me, gave me life advice, Nick-­style, and he was so, like, nice.”
“Did you…did you, you know, like him?” I try.
“No,” she says, “no. Actually, well, not like that. It wasn’t about the kiss. We both knew I was being silly. It’s more…we talked about my life, and he had this way—­things I haven’t told anyone, then we…well, I kissed him, and he said…” She lowers her voice, and I wait, but she composes herself. “I just think things could have worked out differently since that night. That’s all.”
Since that night. Ah, having the power to go back, rewrite our lives. Yuki’s right, and I’m stunned that we’re both feeling the same. I follow her gaze. Against the backdrop of the window, Charlotte is talking to the woman with the chunky necklace, the one who stood near us in church. The woman rummages in her bag to offer a handkerchief, a real fabric one, places her hand on Charlotte’s shoulder, her face so close to hers that, for a moment, I expect their foreheads to meet and perhaps them both to lift up, levitating in the air.
I want love. I want connection. I just don’t know how to get it. How to say and do the right things. Instead, I haven’t done anything. For two years, I’ve stood still, waiting for things to get better by themselves. If Chomsky were here, I would sit in a corner and hug the hell out of him to give myself courage. I also, weirdly, long for Nick. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about him today, it’s that he gave good advice. It sounds like both Yuki and I could do with some. About who to love, how to be better friends. How to stop watching life passing us by like missed trains. Perhaps I’ll go to Switzerland this summer, spend some time with Mum, help Marion. Call Romain.
As Yuki isn’t saying any more, I check my phone for the message I received earlier. A WhatsApp from Marion. We used to be close, before I left, especially when Dad moved away. Even in the first year of me being here, she used to send me funny memes. Now she only texts me with bad news I can’t do anything about from here: Mum didn’t get up today. Mum threw away our photo albums. I got her the wrong granola and she burst into tears. I open her message, bracing myself.
M: I just saw that Romain got engaged. I thought you needed to know.
It’s not so much of a surprise, more like a blow to the head I’d been living in fear of. It doesn’t hurt any less. I close my eyes to blink away this new reality, but when I open them again, the text says the same. My browser tabs are still open. With clumsy fingers, I navigate from Nick’s Facebook page to Romain’s, and here it is: the blue-­and-­white life event, accompanied by a plethora of photos of Romain and Aurélie-­with-­whom-­it’s-­not-­going-­to-­last by the lake, the ring sparkling on her hand laid on his chest. Engaged—­July 15.
I don’t think. I immediately go to my texts, press New, type his name. I don’t know what I want to say. I just want… I need… I need something to happen. I can’t be left with this. The tiny text box opens, above which is the last text in our last conversation. From him. Unanswered by me. I see the date, and my breath freezes in my lungs. No.
It comes back.
“That night, Yuki.” My voice is strangled. My hands are shaking. I speak to her, unable to take my eyes off the screen, glued to it by the coincidence of time, the enormity of my missed chance. “At your birthday, two years ago. Romain texted me. He told me he missed me.”
“And what did you do?”
“I ignored it.”
My heart is beating in my throat as the memories pull me back to that night. It was the first time—­and the last time—­that he’d said it. That he’d reached out like that. Why did I ignore it? I had felt happy, out with Yuki’s friends, then the text came and I panicked. I told myself I was better off building a life here, away from the heartache, that I needed to move on. Now I know I was scared. I was scared of opening myself up to him, of potentially being hurt by him again. Hindsight isn’t such a wonderful thing.
It’s clear now. Yuki is right. That was the point where it all went wrong. That was the point when I decided to shut the door to possibilities. I feel like I’m going to faint—­blood beating in my ears, my vision blurring. Is it the lager suddenly rushing to my head? I feel like I’m fading away, losing contact with reality.
“Shall we…?” I nudge Yuki, securing my beloved satchel over my shoulder despite my hands shaking, despite the room closing in on me like a tunnel.
Yuki’s staring at me. “Are you okay?”
I nod. I’ve never had a panic attack, but I’ve seen some of my students go through one, and I’m pretty sure this is what it’s like. “I…can we just go, please? I’m sorry.” Black flies mottle my vision as I try to control myself long enough to get away. All that missed time, all the regrets and worries I’ve worked hard at keeping under a lid these past two years are spilling everywhere. I’m finally drowning.
“Well, sure, I guess there’s nothing left to say, nothing to be done. It’s too late anyway.” Yuki struggles to retrieve her bag, which she hung on a hook under the bar. With her other hand, she ruffles her hair, and I think she’s crying, so I try to help her. As I bend down, my elbow knocks over the half drink I’ve abandoned, sending great splashes of pee-­like liquid all over the counter and beyond.
They say change happens when something moves. As the glass crashes, the beating of my heart takes over, and everybody turns and watches us, me with my hand extended to catch it, always too slow, always too late; Yuki frozen, drenched in lager. I can’t breathe with the knowledge that I’ve ruined the day, the funeral, everything—­this fifteenth day of July, that other one two years ago, and all the chances in between that I missed due to fear, cowardliness. If only I could erase it, make a different decision.
Time accelerates, slows down, building pressure in my ears as if I were on a roller coaster or a submarine. Seconds start to fizz and bubble away until it’s all mixed up, all the sour regrets, then the pub door opens for me, and I stumble out…

We go back.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

“A compassionate ode to the beautiful messiness of being human.” — Glendy Vanderah

“Reminiscent of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Rebecca Serle’s In Five Years.” — Booklist

A life-affirming debut that blends a poignant exploration of friendship and loss with a truly unforgettable love story.

What would you do if you had one more chance for the life of your dreams?

Lou feels like she is stuck on the wrong path: alone, in a city far from home, watching other people be happy. When the man she’s in love with announces his engagement to someone else, Lou is consumed by ‘what ifs’.

That’s when she finds herself slipping back in time to a night two years ago, where one small decision changed everything…

Suddenly, Lou has a chance to fix her mistakes. But as her choices lead her down roads she never could have imagined, she finds herself stuck in a time loop of her own making. And with each slip, Lou notices her life intersecting with one person again and again. A friend of a friend who once lived on the periphery, who is slowly becoming the one person who makes her feel like she might finally be on the right track.

Lou is about to realize that our greatest love stories aren’t always the ones we expected, but are the ones we choose to fight for.

For anyone who has ever felt stuck on the wrong path comes a stunning, time-bending love story that challenges what it means to get things “right.” This is a book that will pull at your heartstrings and make you realize that our world is full of inspiring people poised to change everything…and you might just be one of them.
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Meet the Author:

SARAH JOST is a Swiss national who has been living in the UK since 2008. She works as a Housemistress and French teacher at a girls’ school, which she considers an immersive course in character study. Sarah lives in Buckinghamshire with her partner Luke and their adorable and destructive puppy Winnie. Five First Chances is her debut.
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