The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Author: Mitch Alborn • Publisher: Hyperion
Price: ¥966 • ISBN: 1-4013-9803-0

In Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Alborn introduces us to Eddie, a blunt 83-year-old, who is forcibly retired from life one day in a carnival ride accident, and finds himself on the outskirts of heaven.
All is not wings and harps up there, though. The setting looks depressingly familiar to Eddie: his old neighbourhood and workplace. Eddie will be taken back through his life, his childhood, his wartime service, his marriage, his endless work, escorted by five people he has known, to varying degrees, throughout the long, difficult and (to his mind) uneventful decades.

If this sounds familiar to you, it did to me too while I was reading it. The parallels to the ghosts in Dickens' Christmas Carol and Clarence the Guardian Angel in It's a Wonderful Life are unavoidable. Alborn adds a modern twist, though. Although a bit of a curmudgeon, old Eddie is not Ebenezer Scrooge: he isn't a greedy monster, he hasn't knowingly wronged anybody. He's the old guy working in the back room, whom you notice, peripherally, only when something breaks down and you're inconvenienced on the way to work. While Dickens' shows us a man rejecting his bad life and becoming good, Alborn tells us a parable about a good man coming to accept the value of a life which he (and many who knew him) thought pointless. The acceptance of his own value, in the end, is what gets him into the cloudy part of heaven.

Mitch Alborn's previous book, the huge bestseller"Tuesdays With Morrie" was the tale of an elderly man who could still, at the end of his life, inspire the young. This book takes it a step further and suggests that our lives can also inspire ourselves, if we let them.

PS I Love You

Author: Cecelia Ahern • Publisher: Hyperion
Price: ¥1092 • ISBN: 1-4013-9961-4

When I first picked up the novel PS-I Love You, I was confused by the cover. The title's been done before, so I was expecting to sit down to a reissue of the biography of Peter Sellers or yet another book about the Beatles and their lyrics. But would either of those, I thought, have a pink cover featuring a woman in a pink dress clutching a letter? (actually, I could imagine Peter Sellers or John Lennon posing for just such a cover, but I digress) This is a first novel by 22-year-old Cecelia Ahern, daughter of Bertie, the Irish prime minister.

The story begins with a remembered death. Holly, a young Irish wife, is mourning her equally young husband Gerry, who has just died after a long illness. Ahern's portrayal of mourning - the inanimate objects all around provoking memories, the hours or moments lost in reverie of what was or might have been - is described convincingly and at length.
What brings Holly out of her trance is a package of letters, which Gerry left with Holly's mother before he died. Each letter sets a task for Holly and she must open them, in sequence, at the beginning of each month.

Each letter ends with, "P.S., I love you." As Holly follows his instructions (The first one is "get a new bedside lamp," another is "Go to karaoke."), Holly starts getting back into life. The irony is, that by following Gerry's advice, she slowly develops confidence in herself and takes charge of her life. Her large extended family and friends, who help her along, are also portrayed in all their charming eccentricities. It's not giving too much away to say that eventually Holly gets herself a job meets a few new men in her life, and Gerry has prepared her for these events too.

Book Reviews by Chris Page

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