Five Minutes Later (The Five Minutes Series, Book 2) by Drew Tolbert

Book 2 of The Five Minutes Series: a clean, coming-of-age time travel novel set in small-town Alabama. Originally published as Leaving the Oak Tree.

Cover of Five Minutes Later by Drew Tolbert, originally published as Leaving the Oak Tree

The Future We Broke

Every time travel story has the same rule. Don’t change anything.

So naturally, they changed something.

In Five Minutes Sooner, Eric, Lucas, and Josh found a way to bend time with a rock, a lightning strike, and a truck battery. In Five Minutes Later, they find out what it costs.

This book stops asking whether the past can be changed and starts asking a scarier question: what happens when you succeed?

Because fixing one moment doesn’t just fix one moment. It knocks over the next one, and the one after that. The three friends from Warrior, Alabama are about to learn that protecting the people you love can do just as much damage as losing them. Maybe more.

So they try to get ahead of it. An email shows up from nobody they know, with two dates and two times: August 25, 2001, at 3:25 PM, and November 11, 1811, at 11:11 AM. One sends them back to the oak tree to have a very awkward conversation with the teenagers they used to be. The other sends them back two hundred years. And somewhere in between, a man named Skyler Maddox is already a step ahead of them.

Five Minutes Later is a clean, coming-of-age time travel novel about responsibility, unintended consequences, and the uncomfortable truth that winning at time travel might create more confusion than clarity. Same small-town Alabama heart. Bigger stakes. Fewer excuses.

If Book 1 made you wonder what you’d do with five more minutes, Book 2 is going to make you wonder whether you should have asked.

Originally published as Leaving the Oak Tree. Same story, new name.

Get the Book

Get the original edition on Amazon while it’s still available under its original title.

New to the series? Start with Five Minutes Sooner.

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The Five Minutes Series

  1. Five Minutes Sooner: One Call Before Goodbye
  2. Five Minutes Later: The Future We Broke (you are here)
  3. Five Minutes Forever: The Cost of Never Dying