Rebecca Serle on Time Travel, Fate vs. Free Will, and Her New Novel Once and Again

Rebecca Serle has built a career on a single, irresistible question: what would you do if you could see how it ends? On this episode of Booked, Blonde & Busy, Olivia Ponton sits down with the bestselling author to talk about her new novel Once and Again and the obsession that runs through all of her books: time, fate, and how much of a life is actually ours to choose.

The author who bends time

Serle is the writer behind In Five Years, the word-of-mouth phenomenon whose one-hour flash-forward left a generation of readers staring at the wall, and One Italian Summer, where a grieving daughter meets her own mother as a young woman. Once and Again extends that signature: take ordinary people, introduce one impossible rule about time, and watch what the pressure reveals. Ponton, who has been open about reading Serle’s books in single devastating sittings, is the right host for this: a reader first, an interviewer second.

Fate versus free will

The conversation keeps circling back to one tension. Her premises look like fantasy, but the questions underneath are deeply practical: if you knew the ending, would you still walk toward it? Is a future you have glimpsed a destiny or a warning? On the episode she talks about why she is drawn to that line between fate and free will, and why the speculative device is never the point. The time-bending is a way to corner her very grounded characters into deciding what they actually want, before life decides for them.

Why Once and Again belongs in the same universe

Once and Again is being discussed here as Serle’s newest, and it fits the pattern that made her a fixture on the bestseller lists: emotionally precise, structurally clever, and built around a what-if that aches. For readers who came to her through In Five Years or Expiration Dates, the episode is a map of where her preoccupations go next, the same writer asking the same big question from a new angle.

This is also exactly what Booked, Blonde & Busy does well. It treats a novel as the start of a real conversation rather than a publicity stop, and it gives an author like Serle room to talk about craft and meaning, not just plot. For anyone who has felt one of her endings land, this is the conversation that explains the machine underneath.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Booked, Blonde & Busy.