Synopses & Reviews
From the author of the number one
New York Times bestseller
Tuesdays with Morrie comes this long-awaited follow-up, an enchanting, beautifully crafted novel that explores a mystery only heaven can unfold.
Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. As the park has changed over the years from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline Plunge so, too, has Eddie changed, from optimistic youth to embittered old age. His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.
Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.
One by one, Eddie's five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the still-unknown last act of his life: Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.
In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom gives us an astoundingly original story that will change everything you've ever thought about the afterlife and the meaning of our lives here on earth. With a timeless tale, appealing to all, this is a book that readers of fine fiction, and those who loved Tuesdays with Morrie, will treasure.
Review
"Sincere....A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers." The New York Times
Review
"Simply told, sentimental, and profoundly true, this is an contemporary American fable that will be cherished by a vast readership." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
"Fans of Tuesdays with Morrie will be delighted with this novel." People magazine
Review
"A sweet book that makes you smile but is not gooey with overwrought sentiment." Booklist
Review
"Transcendent....Albom has aimed high here, and there's a whiff of paradise as a result." Atlanta Journal Constitution
Review
"This is a lovely book, sweet, entertaining and wise. What a gutsy, surprising follow-up to Morrie." Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies and Blue Shoe
Review
"It's easy to feel an affinity for this simplistic, folksy bathos; it's easier, after all, to act for the sake of heaven than to make the considered and nuanced moral choices that really confront us in life. And it is here that Albom fails. His character makes no moral choices, he does not ponder the depths of his existence, he is merely a reactive stick figure that has to go to cotton-candy heaven to learn that his life had meaning. It's single-serve religion for a drive-thru, strip-mall, mega-church kind of country." Sacha Zimmerman, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?"
About the Author
Mitch Albom is an author, playwright, and screenwriter who has written seven books, including the international bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, the bestselling memoir of all time. His first novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, was an instant number-one New York Times bestseller that has since sold more than six million copies worldwide. Both books were made into acclaimed TV films. Mitch also works as a columnist and a broadcaster, and serves on numerous charitable boards. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.