Just One Year

**This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.**

One_________AUGUSTParis_________

It s the dream I always have: I m on a plane, high above the clouds. The plane starts to descend, and I have this sudden panic because I just know that I m on the wrong plane, am traveling to the wrong place. It s never clear where I m landing in a war zone, in the midst of an epidemic, in the wrong century only that it s somewhere I shouldn t be. Sometimes I try to ask the person next to me where we are going, but I can never quite see a face, can never quite hear an answer. I wake in a disoriented sweat to the sound of the landing gear dropping, to the echo of my heart beat­ing. It usually takes me a few moments to find my bearings, to locate where it is I am an apartment in Prague, a hostel in Cairo but even once that s been established, the sense of being lost lingers.

I think I m having the dream now. Just as always, I lift the shade to peer at the clouds. I feel the hydraulic lurch of the engines, the thrust downward, the pressure in my ears, the ignition of panic. I turn to the faceless person next to me only this time I get the feeling it s not a stranger. It s someone I know. Someone I m traveling with. And that fills me with such intense relief. We can t both have gotten on the wrong plane.

Do you know where we re going? I ask. I lean closer. I m just about there, just about to see a face, just about to get an answer, just about to find out where it is I m going

And then I hear sirens.




I first noticed the sirens in Dubrovnik. I was traveling with a guy I d met in Albania, when we heard a siren go by. It sounded like the kind they have in American action movies, and the guy I was traveling with commented on how each country had its own siren sound. It s helpful because if you forget where you are, you can always close your eyes, let the sirens tell you, he told me. I d been gone a year by then, and it had taken me a few minutes to

Gayle Forman is an award-winning, internationally bestselling author and journalist. She is the author of Just One Day and Just One Year, and the companion e-novella Just One Night, as well as the New York Times bestsellers If I Stay and Where She Went. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughters.

Praise for Just One Year:

* The complexity of Willem s character, the twisting plot, and far-flung settings (including the Netherlands, Mexico, and India) create an alluring story that pushes beyond the realm of star-crossed romance.  Publishers Weekly starred review
 
As much a travelogue as it is a romance, this novel will appeal to fans of the movie Before Sunrise or Maureen Johnson's 13 Little Blue Envelopes (HarperCollins, 2005). School Library Journal

As [Willem] becomes engaged personally and professionally, readers will find their interest quickening, right up to the satisfying denouement. Kirkus Reviews