In this genre-bending novel, there is no such thing as chance and every action is carefully executed by highly trained agents. You’ll never look at coincidences the same way again.

What if the drink you just spilled, the train you just missed, or the lottery ticket you just found was not just a random occurrence? What if it’s all part of a bigger plan? What if there’s no such thing as a chance encounter? What if there are people we don’t know determining our destiny? And what if they are even planning the fate of the world?

Enter the Coincidence Makers?Guy, Emily, and Eric?three seemingly ordinary people who work for a secret organization devoted to creating and carrying out coincidences. What the rest of the world sees as random occurrences, are, in fact, carefully orchestrated events designed to spark significant changes in the lives of their targets?scientists on the brink of breakthroughs, struggling artists starved for inspiration, loves to be, or just plain people like you and me…

When an assignment of the highest level is slipped under Guy’s door one night, he knows it will be the most difficult and dangerous coincidence he’s ever had to fulfill. But not even a coincidence maker can see how this assignment is about to change all their lives and teach them the true nature of fate, free will, and the real meaning of love.

Part thriller, part mystery, part love story?Kirkus calls Yoav Blum's The Coincidence Makers “a smart, unpredictable, and heartfelt adventure story.”

Look at the line of time.

Of course, it is only an illusion. Time is a space, not a line.

But for our purposes, look at the line of time.

Watch it. Identify how each event on the line is both a cause and effect. Try to locate its starting point.

You will not succeed, of course.

Every now has a before.

This is probably the main—though not the most obvious—problem you will encounter as coincidence makers.

Therefore, before studying theory and practice, formulas and statistics, before you start to make coincidences, let’s start with the simplest exercise. Look again at the line of time.

Find the correct spot, place a finger on it, and simply decide:

“This is the starting point.”

1

Here too, like always, timing was everything.

Five hours before painting the southern wall in his apartment for the 250th time, Guy sat at the small café and tried to sip his coffee in a deliberate, calculated way. His body was tilted back a bit from the table, leaning in a position that was supposed to suggest a calmness engendered by years of self-discipline, with the small coffee cup gently cradled between his fingers like a precious seashell. From the corner of his eye, he followed the progress of the second hand on the large clock hanging above the cash register. As always, in the final moments before implementation, he felt the same frustrating awareness of his breathing and his heartbeat, which occasionally drowned out the ticktock of the seconds.

The café was half full.

He glanced around at the people and again saw in his mind the spiderwebs that traversed the air, the thin and invisible connections that linked them. Sitting across from him at the other end of the café was a round-faced teenager, resting her head against the windowpane, allowing the

music produced by marketing alchemists specializing in teenage romance to flood her thoughts via thin earphone wires. Her closed eyes, her relaxed facial features—everything radiated serenity. Guy didn’t know enough about her to determine whether it was indeed genuine. The young woman wasn’t part of the equation at the moment. She wasn’t supposed to be part of it—just part of the background buzz.

An insecure couple on a first or second date sat at the table opposite the young woman, trying to navigate through what was perhaps a friendly conversation, or a job interview for the position of spouse, or a quiet war of witticisms camouflaged by smiles and occasional side-glances in order to avoid the prolonged eye contact that would create a false sense of intimacy. In fact, this couple

was an example of all hurried relationships that anxiously revolve around themselves. The world was full of such couplings, regardless of how hard it tried to prevent them.

A bit toward the back, in the corner, sat a student busy erasing the face of an old love from his heart, at a table full of papers covered in dense handwriting. He gazed at a large mug of hot chocolate, immersed in a daydream disguised as academic concentration. Guy knew his name, medical history, emotional history, musings, dreams, small fears. Guy had everything filed away somewhere . . . everything he needed to know in order to guess the possibilities, to try to arrange

them in accordance with the complex statistics of causes and effects.

Finally, two waitresses with tired eyes—who were somehow still smiling and standing—conducted a quiet, intense conversation by the closed door to the kitchen. Or rather, one of them spoke while the other listened, nodding occasionally, offering signs according to the predetermined “I’m Paying Attention” protocol, though it seemed to Guy she was thinking about something completely different.

He also knew her history. Anyway, he hoped he did.

He put down the cup of coffee and counted the seconds in his head.

It was seventeen minutes before four o’clock in the afternoon, according to the clock above the cash register.

He knew that each person in the café would have a slightly different time on his or her watch. A half a minute before or after didn’t really matter.

After all, people were not only differentiated from one another by place. They also operated in different times. To a certain extent, they moved within a personal time bubble of their own making. Part of Guy’s work, as the General had said, was to bring these times together without generating the sense of an artificial encounter.

Guy himself didn’t have a watch. He’d discovered that he didn’t ever use one. He was so conscious of time that he had no need for it.

He always loved this warm sensation, which nearly permeated the bone, during the minute preceding the execution of a mission. It was the sensation that came from knowing he was about to reach out a finger and nudge the planet, or the heavens. The knowledge that he would be diverting things from their regular and familiar path, things that until a second ago were moving in a completely different direction. He was like a man painting great and complex landscapes, but without a brush and paint—simply with the precise and gentle turn of a big kaleidoscope. If I didn’t exist, he’d thought more than once, they would need to invent me. They would have to.

Billions of such movements happened everyday, corresponding with each other, offsetting each other and swinging each other in a tragic-comic dance of possible futures. None of the protagonists were aware of these movements. And he, in one simple decision, saw the change that was about to happen, and then executed it. Elegantly, quietly, secretly. Even if it were exposed, no one would believe what stood behind it. And still, he always trembled a bit beforehand.

“First of all,” the General had told them when they began, “you are secret agents. All the others are first of all agents and secondly secret, but you are first of all secret and to a certain extent, also agents.”

Guy inhaled deeply, and everything started to happen.

The teenage girl at the table across from him moved a bit as one song in the playlist finished and another began. She shifted the position of her head on the windowpane, opened her eyes, and stared outside.

The student shook his head.

The couple, still sizing each other up, chuckled in embarrassment, as if there were no other type of chuckle in the world.

The second hand had already completed a quarter of its circuit.

Guy exhaled.

He pulled the wallet out of his pocket.

Exactly on time, a short and irritable summons tore the two waitresses from each other, sending one of them into the kitchen.

He placed a few dollars on the table.

The student began to collect his papers, still slow and pensive.

The second hand reached its halfway mark.

Guy put down his cup, still half full, exactly three-quarters of an inch from the edge of the table, on top of the money. When the hand on the clock reached forty-two, he stood and waved to the waitress who remained outside the kitchen, in a motion that communicated both “thank you” and “good-bye.”

She waved back to him and started to move toward the table.

As the second hand passed its three-quarter mark, Guy walked toward the sun-drenched street and disappeared from the view of the café patrons.

Three, two, one . . . view abbreviated excerpt only...

Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.