The Second Chance Store: A Novel

Written by Lauren Bravo

Narrated by Jane Collingwood

If clothes can get a second chance, why can’t we? Brimming with life, love, and the stories bound up in even the most everyday items, The Second Chance Store is a tale of friendship, loss, and dusting yourself off and starting over—a novel filled with humor and a testament to the enduring power and joy of charity shops.

City dweller Gwen feels like she’s living a secondhand life. She’s thirty-eight, perpetually single, and in dire need of a dentist’s appointment. Her friends are busy procreating in the country, and conversations with her parents seem to revolve entirely around hedge borders and the trash pickup schedule. Above all she’s lonely. But then, isn’t everyone?

Then she’s let go from a job she drifted into a decade ago and never left, and Gwen realizes it’s time to make a change, starting with cleaning out her apartment. In the charity shop where she literally and metaphorically unloads her baggage, she discovers a group of weird and wonderful people devoted to finding a new home for donated items that have lost their use elsewhere. Gwen volunteers there—and finds a new home for herself among her fellow workers while discovering joy in the untold stories of secondhand things.

Now it’s time for Gwen to get out of her life in pause, and to find a way to move forward with bravery and humanity—and more regular dental care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Jul 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9780063277809

Lauren Bravo

Lauren Bravo is an author and award-winning freelance journalist who writes about fashion, popular culture, food, travel, and feminism. She is the author of What Would the Spice Girls Do? and How to Break Up with Fast Fashion—which was inspired by her yearlong fast-fashion ban—and a contributor to the intersectional feminist essay collection This Is How We Come Back Stronger: Feminist Writers on Turning Crisis into Change. Lauren volunteers once a week at her local Crisis UK charity shop, which provided rich and bountiful inspiration for her debut novel The Second Chance Store (as well as a chance to get first dibs on all the best clothes).