See the Cover of Evelyn Skye’s ‘Ideal Life’ (Exclusive)

If you’ve ever wished you could turn back time, Evelyn Skye’s new novel might be for you.

The New York Times bestselling author’s Ideal Life — touted as perfect for fans of Rebecca Serle and Taylor Jenkins Reid — tells the “warmhearted” story of a scientist, Talia, who gets the chance to turn back time to pursue her ideal life, “only to realize it might keep her from truly living,” per a synopsis from publisher Emily Bestler Books.

As the book begins, Talia has built her dream career: “a neuroscience startup poised for a $100 million acquisition that will validate years of relentless work to make the world better through technology.”

“But when a glitch in her app leads to catastrophe, everything she’s worked for crumbles in a single night,” the synopsis adds.

Soon after, things take a strange turn — Talia wakes up with a mysterious watch that lets her travel back in time, 24 hours prior.

“Suddenly, she can prevent the glitch, ace that crucial meeting and savor perfect Sunday afternoons with Sam, her brilliant best friend who’s quietly loved her for nearly two decades,” the synopsis adds. “The watch feels like the ultimate optimization tool, a way to debug her life until every moment is flawless.”

But Talia quickly gets addicted, endlessly taking the opportunity to perfect her life while driving a wedge between herself and her friends. Everything comes to a head when Talia discovers a conspiracy to turn her life’s work into a tool for mass manipulation, and “she faces an impossible choice: use the watch to cheat her way to stopping it, or accept that the messy, imperfect version of her life might be the only one worth living.”

The novel, from the author of hits like The Incredible Kindness of Paper and The Hundred Loves of Juliet, has just one question as its core: “What if you could rewind the last 24 hours and perfect your life?”

Read an exclusive excerpt from Ideal Life below.

Talia hadn’t meant to fall asleep. It was still dark outside her office windows, though, so she couldn’t have been out for too long.

Groaning, she wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth and sat up and stretched. The streetlamp outside caught the glass face of her watch.

Wait, what?

She didn’t wear a watch.

But there was definitely a watch on her wrist now.

It was an elegant analog clock with a silver link strap, black roman numerals on a white face, showing that it was 1:30 in the morning. On the right was a blue knob — the crown — with two little arrows on it, one pointing up and the other, down.

Talia had never seen this watch before in her life.

She jumped up from the sofa and poked her head outside of her office door. “Hello? Are you guys pranking me?” Maybe some of her employees had come back upstairs, seen their boss passed out in a sugar fugue and decided to mess with her.

There was no one there. Also, she had locked the door to her office.

Talia was too groggy to figure out if it was a joke, though. She turned her attention instead to the watch itself — namely, the arrows on the crown.

“Why label it?” she mumbled. “Kind of obvious that the knob goes either one way or the other.”

Still, she turned the crown in the direction of the down arrow.

Nothing happened. The knob didn’t budge, and the hands on the watch didn’t move like they ought to. It was like it was stuck on the current time.

So Talia turned it the other way.

The crown spun easily with an accompanying mechanical whirring beneath it as the internal gears moved the watch’s hands backward.

But all around Talia, her vision whipped into a frenzy, too, like she was rewinding a movie at 4x speed.

“What the—?”

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All of a sudden, she found herself not sitting on the couch, but at her desk with a partially demolished sheet cake in front of her and a fork in her hand. Her stomach lurched a bit, as if she were on a rollercoaster. In reverse.

What just happened?

The time on the watch said it was 12:30 a.m., a full hour earlier than it had been a few seconds ago.

Talia shook her head. This has to be a dream.

She slapped herself across the cheek, then pinched herself really hard.

12:31 a.m.

How was this possible?

Then Talia gasped. “No…”

At 11:11, she had wished she could rewind the day to stop the murder.

But that couldn’t really be what had happened, right?

Talia was a scientist, which meant she never accepted the first result without deeper experimentation. So she took a deep breath and turned the crown upward again, just a little, but slowly this time. Everything around her reversed. Including a bite of cake coming out of her mouth and back on to the fork, then back into the cake itself.

12:25 a.m. She’d gone five minutes into the past.

Oh my god.

Her pulse sped up at the possibility that maybe she could go back and stop the murder from happening. She wouldn’t know unless she tried.

Talia spun the watch crown hard, and her vision and her body flew into reverse as if sucked into the past at hyperspeed.

Adapted excerpt from Ideal Life, Copyright © 2026 by Evelyn Skye published by Emily Bestler Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Ideal Life hits shelves Aug. 18, 2026 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.