When your luck won’t change, sometimes you have to.
In Fuko Brewer’s world, luck is not evenly distributed. Some people coast through life on perfect timing and green lights, while Fuko lives with an affliction of “small misfortune.” Trains stall when she’s late, luggage disappears, and when the forecast promises clear skies, it somehow rains on her anyway. After two years of unemployment, she returns to her hometown in Japan to visit her mother’s grave, only to be handed a strange gift-shop amulet by a temple monk. It comes with an unusual ability: it will ring when her luck changes. It chimes for the first time at a secluded mountain hot spring… right as a stranger accidentally walks in on her. Moments later, an invitation to interview in London lands in her inbox.
Back in the city, Fuko is determined to treat the interview like a lifeline, until she realizes the hot-spring stranger, Toby Lewis, is on the panel and has definitely recognised her. Somehow, she lands the internship anyway, and Toby becomes part of her everyday life. He’s charming, quick-witted, and inconveniently hard to avoid, and the closer he gets, the more Fuko’s luck seems to misbehave. When Toby finds out about the amulet, he makes a bold suggestion: if she wants that bell to ring for the better, she has to stop hiding from life, take a few risks, and let him teach her how. But as a work crisis threatens her hard-won second chance and Toby’s own carefully guarded truths begin to surface, Fuko learns that luck is only part of the story. The next time that amulet rings, it might not be her fortune changing. It might be her.