Read-alike guide
Books Like The Five People You Meet in Heaven: 8 Stories About What a Life Means
The Five People You Meet in Heaven asks a simple question: did my life matter? The book is short and easy to read, but it stays with you for years.
Book Two · The Train Between Worlds
The Memory Fare
A novel of a mother, a missing daughter, and the train that charges in memories.
This is not a heaven book, but it asks the same big question: what do we owe the people we love? Cora Marsh boards a train that doesn’t appear on any schedule, looking for her daughter June, who vanished six years ago. The fare is not money. Every door she opens costs one true memory of June, and she will never know which one she paid.
Like Five People, it uses one clear, strange rule to look at a whole love. It is quieter and more haunting, and it is not a comfort read in the way Albom is: the cost is real and the book does not pretend otherwise. It is short, about 24,000 words, and it stands alone: Book Two of three novels set on the same train, and the one most readers start with.
A standalone novel — no need to have read Book One
Short answer
The closest books like The Five People You Meet in Heaven are Mitch Albom’s own: the sequel, The Next Person You Meet in Heaven, for exactly the same feeling, and The Time Keeper, another short fable. For a true story, Tuesdays with Morrie (non-fiction). To laugh and cry over an ordinary life, A Man Called Ove. For lives secretly connected, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. For something literary, Lincoln in the Bardo. For short bites, Sum. For a big story about belief, Life of Pi.
What to expect from The Memory Fare
This site publishes a novel that shares the question, if not the heaven:
- Same as Five People
- One simple, strange rule that opens up a life, and an ordinary person at the centre of it.
- Different
- No heaven and no guides; a mother on a train, paying in memories. Speculative, not spiritual.
- Tone
- Quiet and devastating, rather than gently uplifting.
- Length
- About 24,000 words: two to three hours.
- Content notes
- A missing child, parental grief, prolonged searching. No on-page violence.
- Formats
- Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
What readers love about The Five People You Meet in Heaven
In Mitch Albom’s 2003 novel, Eddie, an amusement-park maintenance man at Ruby Pier, dies on his eighty-third birthday trying to save a little girl from a broken ride. In heaven he meets five people, some he knew and some he never did, who each explain one piece of his life to him. It spent 95 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
If you finished it and wanted more, you are not alone: readers have been asking for books similar to it on Reddit and Goodreads for years. This list gathers the best answers: gentle, moving books about life, death, love and the people who shape us. No spoilers. Each book below shares at least one of the things people love about Eddie’s story:
- A simple, big idea. One clear premise that opens up a whole life.
- Ordinary people. Eddie is not a hero. He is a maintenance man.
- Connection. Lives touch each other in ways we never see.
- Comfort. It is about death, but it leaves you feeling hopeful.
One is non-fiction, and is labelled so. If you came here because of a recent death rather than a love of the book, the companion list of fiction books about grief may serve you better.
8 books like The Five People You Meet in Heaven
In the order of the original list: Albom first, then the books his readers most often go to next.
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The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
Closest match More of exactly the sameThe sequel follows Annie, the little girl Eddie tried to save at Ruby Pier, now grown up. Shortly after her wedding, a hot-air-balloon ride ends in an accident with a high-tension wire, and Annie finds herself in heaven, meeting five people of her own and learning what her life, shadowed by that day at the pier, has meant. One of the five is a dog.
If you want more of the same feeling, start here: same structure, same short chapters, same gentle voice, and the pleasure of seeing the first book from the other side. Be honest with yourself about what you loved, though. Kirkus was blunt that it is for readers who prize simple, sentimental wisdom and sweet resolutions; if that is what Eddie gave you, this gives it again. If you loved the first book for its surprise, the sequel cannot repeat that.
- How it ends
- It closes the circle with the first book, and readers who loved Eddie are not disappointed.
- Contains
- An accidental death; Guilt and a child’s injury in the backstory
- Skip if
- You want something that does not follow the first book’s formula; this one keeps it exactly.
Checked against: Kirkus review (Harper, 2018, 240 pp)
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The Time Keeper
Closest match A short parableLong ago, a man named Dor becomes the first person to measure time, and is punished for it: banished to a cave for thousands of years as Father Time, forced to listen to every human voice begging for more time or less. To earn his release he is sent back to Earth to help two people. Sarah Lemon is a teenager who, after her parents’ divorce and a rejection, wants her life to end. Victor Delamonte is a rich, dying businessman who plans to have himself frozen.
It is a short fable in Albom’s simple style, built like Five People around one clear idea and a handful of people whose stories turn out to touch. Where Five People asks whether a life mattered, this one asks what we do with the time we have, and it is the most openly parable-like of his novels. If you like stories that feel like parables, this is the natural next Albom.
- How it ends
- Both of the people Dor is sent to change course, and the fable ends on its lesson, plainly stated.
- Contains
- A teenager’s plan to end her life; Terminal illness
- Skip if
- Morals stated outright put you off; this is Albom at his most directly instructive.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, premise, reception
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Tuesdays with Morrie
Strong match Non-fiction A true storyThis one is true. In 1995 Mitch Albom, by then a busy sportswriter, saw his old Brandeis sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, on ABC’s Nightline, talking about dying of ALS. He went to visit, and kept going: fourteen Tuesdays at Morrie’s house in West Newton, Massachusetts, talking about love, work, family, ageing, forgiveness and death. The book is those conversations, written down.
It is the book that made Albom famous, and it is the reason Five People exists; many readers love it even more. It spent 206 weeks on the New York Times non-fiction list and has sold more than seventeen million copies. Read it if you want real-life wisdom rather than fiction: it is short, it is gentle, and Morrie is funnier than you expect. It is a memoir, not a novel, which is why it is labelled so here.
- How it ends
- Morrie dies, as both men knew he would, and the last pages are about what Albom kept.
- Contains
- A slow death from ALS, with its physical decline described
- Skip if
- You want a story with a plot; it is a series of conversations, and it is non-fiction.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, Nightline, sales, bestseller run
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A Man Called Ove
Strong match Laughter and tearsOve is a grumpy widower with strict rules. He has been made redundant, his wife Sonja has died, and he has a plan to leave the world. Then a noisy young family moves in next door, the pregnant mother reverses a trailer into his letterbox, and the plan keeps being interrupted by people who need something: a stray cat, a teenager thrown out of home, an old friend he has not spoken to in years.
Funny, sad and deeply warm, it is the book most often recommended to Five People readers, because it too looks back over an ordinary life and finds that it mattered. The flashbacks, slowly explaining how Ove became Ove, do what Eddie’s five people do. Kirkus found it occasionally preachy, which is fair, and also the charge against Albom. Read it if you want to laugh and cry in the same chapter. It is also on this site’s list of books like The Midnight Library.
- How it ends
- It ends years later, with the whole street there, and it is the ending the book has been arguing for.
- Contains
- Repeated suicide attempts on the page, some played for comedy; A spouse’s death from cancer; A miscarriage in the backstory
- Skip if
- You cannot stand a grump being redeemed by his neighbours and a cat; it is exactly that book.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, translation, plot, Kirkus review
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My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Strong match Lives secretly connectedElsa is seven, nearly eight, clever and lonely, and her best friend is her outrageous granny, who tells her fairy tales every night about the Land-of-Almost-Awake. Then Granny dies, and leaves Elsa a series of letters to deliver, each one an apology to someone in their apartment building: the huge, silent man everyone calls a monster, a gruff taxi driver, a fussy neighbour named Britt-Marie. Each delivery reveals how many lives her grandmother touched, and that the people in the fairy tales were real all along.
It is part fairy tale, part family story, and the most direct match on this list for the thing Five People does best: showing an ordinary life secretly connected to many others. Kirkus called it “a touching, sometimes-funny, often wise portrait of grief”. It was first published in Swedish in 2013; the UK edition is titled My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises.
- How it ends
- Every letter is delivered, and the fairy tales turn out to have been the truth told sideways.
- Contains
- A grandparent’s death from cancer; Bullying of a child; Old violence and trauma in the neighbours’ pasts
- Skip if
- A precocious child narrator and a lot of whimsy wear you out; the fairy-tale chapters are long.
Checked against: Kirkus review (Atria, 2015, 384 pp), Wikipedia: original title, translation, UK title
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Lincoln in the Bardo
Looser match Literary and unusualFebruary 1862. President Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie has died of typhoid and been placed in a borrowed crypt in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, Washington. That night his father comes back alone to hold the body. The book is told by the cemetery’s other residents, ghosts who will not accept they are dead, speaking one after another like a play, interrupted by quotations from historians and witnesses, some real and some invented.
It is unlike anything else, and takes twenty pages to learn how to read. But at its heart it is the same thing Five People is: the dead reviewing their lives, and the living learning to let go. Where Albom gives you five guides, Saunders gives you a crowd, crude and funny and heartbroken. It won the Booker Prize in 2017, and the audiobook, with 166 voices, is an easier door in. Read it if you want something more literary.
- How it ends
- It ends at dawn, with a departure, and with Lincoln riding back into the war.
- Contains
- A child’s death and a parent’s grief throughout; Crude and violent testimony from some ghosts, including the treatment of enslaved people
- Skip if
- The script-like format of names under speeches puts you off in the first chapter; it does not change.
Checked against: Wikipedia: setting, form, Booker Prize, Kirkus review
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Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Strong match Short bites before bedForty very short stories, each two or three pages, each imagining a different afterlife, by a neuroscientist. In one, God is the size of a microbe and has no idea you exist. In the title story you relive your life with the moments regrouped by kind, so that you spend months at a time doing one thing. In another you wait in a lobby until the last person on earth who remembers you says your name for the last time.
Some are funny, some are sad, and all of them turn back on the reader: each afterlife is really a question about how you are living now, which is the Five People question in forty small doses. It is the lightest book here and the easiest to read in pieces, and it has no religious message. The Royal Opera House made an opera of it. Read it if you want small bites before bed.
- How it ends
- It ends forty times, and the endings are the book.
- Skip if
- You want one story to sink into; Eagleman lets you out every three pages.
Checked against: Wikipedia: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, eagleman.com: Sum
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Life of Pi
Looser match A big story about beliefPi Patel grows up in Pondicherry, the son of a zookeeper, and practises Hinduism, Christianity and Islam at once because he cannot see why he should choose. At sixteen he is shipwrecked in the Pacific and spends 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Then, at the end, two officials investigating the wreck ask him what really happened.
It is an adventure, and a gripping one, but also a story about faith, storytelling and how we make sense of the hardest moments of our lives, which is where it meets Five People: both are about the story we tell to make a life bearable. It won the Booker Prize in 2002 and became Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning film. It is the longest and least gentle book here, so be ready for the middle. Read it if you want a big, unforgettable story about belief.
- How it ends
- It ends with a choice between two stories, and the book asks you to make it.
- Contains
- Animal deaths and violence on the lifeboat, described in detail; Starvation and a darker second account of the voyage
- Skip if
- You are squeamish about animals suffering; the middle third is hard reading.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, structure, Booker, film
Quick guide: which to read first
Pick by the part of Five People you want more of.
| If you want… | Start with | Length |
|---|---|---|
| More of the same | The Next Person You Meet in Heaven | 240 pp |
| Another short parable | The Time Keeper | 240 pp |
| A true story | Tuesdays with Morrie (non-fiction) | 192 pp |
| Laughter and tears | A Man Called Ove | 368 pp |
| Lives secretly connected | My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry | 384 pp |
| Something literary | Lincoln in the Bardo | 368 pp |
| Short reads | Sum | 107 pp |
| A big story about belief | Life of Pi | 356 pp |
Page counts are for first US hardcover editions; paperbacks vary.
Why these “life review” stories feel so comforting
Books like Five People take a life that seems small and show that it mattered. That is something we all want to believe about ourselves and the people we have lost. A simple, magical idea, such as five people waiting in heaven, a man made into Father Time, or forty afterlives, gives us a safe way to think about death and love without it feeling heavy. And because the idea is simple, the feeling has room.
Not all of them are religious. A Man Called Ove, Sum and My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry explore life and death without any religious message, and Life of Pi is about faith without asking you to share one.
Where this page’s facts come from
- Wikipedia: The Five People You Meet in Heaven — Eddie, Ruby Pier and the 95 weeks on the bestseller list
- Wikipedia: Tuesdays with Morrie — the Nightline interview, the fourteen Tuesdays and the sales
- Kirkus Reviews — publishers, dates, page counts and quoted verdicts
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