One Day in December

On a freezing December evening, Laurie is on a crowded bus home when she looks out the window and locks eyes with a man at a bus stop. In that single suspended moment she feels a connection so powerful she is sure he is the one—and then the bus pulls away before either can move. For a year she scans every crowd for him, half-convinced fate will bring them together again.

When she finally meets him, it is not the reunion she dreamed of: he is Jack, the new boyfriend of Sarah, her best friend and flatmate. What follows is a decade of near misses, bad timing, friendship, longing, and the choices people make to protect the ones they love.

Josie Silver's warm, bittersweet debut is a love story told across ten years and many Decembers—about fate and free will, the friends who become family, and whether the right person at the wrong time can ever become the right time too.