Excerpt from Let's Call It a Doomsday by Katie Henry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"The end of the world?"

"Yeah. That's my biggest one, probably. Doomsday, the apocalypse, the end of the world. That's what I worry about most."

She nods once, then again. "The end of the world. That's awesome."

It's not awesome. It is not awesome to dream about tsunamis and wake up in a panic. It is not awesome to sweat through your shirt at airport security because there might be a bomb by the baggage carousel. It is not awesome to imagine your skin peeling off in the wake of a nuclear attack.

I try to say all these things, but I'm so flustered that it comes out more like, "Bflugh."

Hannah moves closer to me. "Ellis. You and I were—" She hesitates. When she speaks again, each word is deliberate, like she's choosing them carefully. "We were meant to meet."

I shake my head. "I don't understand."

She doesn't hesitate this time. "We were meant to meet. It's fate."

Fate, from the Latin fata, the neuter-plural of fatum. Fate, which broken down literally means a thing spoken by the gods. Fate, a word that people use in both wedding announcements and obituaries.

"Fate?" I whisper. She nods, but I can't tell which kind of fate she means.

The bell rings, sudden and jarring. Hannah jumps up. She tightens her backpack straps, ready to go. The spell's been broken.

"I meant what I said. You should hang out with us," Hannah says, hand on the edge of the Human Anthropology bookshelf, two steps away from turning the corner and out of my view. "You remember where?"

"The park, a tree," I say. "But—wait—"

"Look for knitting needles," she says, interrupting smoothly. "And dead writer ladies. That's how you'll know which tree."

"That doesn't make any sense!" I say, as if one single part of this interaction has made sense. "A dead writer—?"

"Dead writer ladies," she clarifies.

"Let's go, everyone." I hear shoes scuffing the floor and Rhonda the Lunch Librarian shooing kids out, from what seems like a million miles away.

Hannah looks over her shoulder. "I'll see you soon, Ellis." She moves to slip around the corner.

"You didn't answer my question!" I yell after her, scrambling to gather my things.

"Which one?" she says.

Not a bad point, since she barely answered any. "You said we were meant to meet, that it was—fate?"

She takes her time answering. "You're afraid of the end of the world."

Is that all she can do, repeat what I already know? I throw down my bag in frustration. "Yes. I am. So what?"

Hannah takes a step toward me. She leans down, and for the first time since she came into the library, she speaks in a whisper.

"So I know how it's going to happen."

Excerpted from Let's Call It a Doomsday by Katie Henry. Copyright © 2019 by Katie Henry. Excerpted by permission of Katherine Tegan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.