“Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meanless 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 5 people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each one changed your path forever.
One by one, Eddie’s five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to it’s 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 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 on earth.”
This book tells the story of a man called Eddie and the five people he meets in heaven. These people are all connected to his life somehow, and throughout the story, while we learn Eddie’s life story, he learns how his life has affected others, and how others have affected him. He also learns how things are not always what they seem. Although a very secular view of heaven (that it is what we want it to be), the explanations that Eddie is given are food for thought for us all.
