You know the game: name five people, living or dead, whose company you would most enjoy for your dream dinner party. The book opens on Sabrina's 30th birthday, with her dream come true: she's dining with her best friend, her favorite college professor, the father she never knew, the love of her life, and Audrey Hepburn. The story alternates between the often-tense dinner party and flashbacks to the past, which reveal the origin—and perhaps fate—of Sabrina's great romance. Without Audrey Hepburn, the bittersweet story would dissolve into sappy, but with her wry presence, it works. For publishing nerds: this is an Amy Einhorn book.

My favorite Rebecca Serle to date! When twenty-something Katy loses her mother to cancer, she loses her best friend in the world, and she has no idea what to do next. She makes the difficult decision to travel to the Amalfi Coast—painful, because she and her mother had planned to take this trip together. At a charming hotel in Positano, Katy imagines what her own mother's visit must have been like many years before, when she first visited the hotel in which Katy is finding solace. But then—Katy's mother appears, in the flesh, though she isn't yet Katy's mother, because she's just thirty years old. This was touching and tender and I inhaled it in a day. Audiophiles take note: Lauren Graham narrates this one.

From the publisher: "Dannie Kohan lives her life by the numbers. She is nothing like her lifelong best friend—the wild, whimsical, believes-in-fate Bella. Her meticulous planning seems to have paid off after she nails the most important job interview of her career and accepts her boyfriend's marriage proposal in one fell swoop, falling asleep completely content. But when she awakens, she's suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. Dannie spends one hour exactly five years in the future before she wakes again in her own home on the brink of midnight—but it is one hour she cannot shake. In Five Years is an unforgettable love story, but it is not the one you're expecting."

In this contemporary and gently magical novel, every time Daphne Bell meets a new man, the Universe sends her a piece of paper containing his name and a number on it—the exact amount of time they’ll be together. It took her a while to figure out how those notes work, but once she did, she was able to see that they were never wrong. And this makes her feel occasionally hopeful, but mostly cursed—until she receives a note that says she’s found the relationship that will last forever. But Daphne finds herself unable to stop wrestling with the question of what she wants for her romantic future, even when she thinks she knows that future is certain. I read this in a day and appreciated the way Serle’s little injection of magic prodded me to think differently about my own life. As someone who’s never been to L.A., I especially enjoyed the strong sense of place: this book is set in many specific neighborhoods in L.A., and I googled every single one as I read!