Is there an audiobook of The Five People You Meet in Heaven?

Yes. The Five People You Meet in Heaven has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mitch Albom.

How long is the The Five People You Meet in Heaven audiobook?

The The Five People You Meet in Heaven audiobook runs 4 hr 38 min.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom book cover for the Book of the Day contemporary book review

Our score

4.7/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Five People You Meet in Heaven free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDSeptember 2003

Genres

Fiction Contemporary Magical Realism

Themes

Regret over a life that never left homeMeaning that only becomes visible in retrospectSacrifice and the debts strangers owe each otherForgiveness offered late, and the hope after itWhat if every life is wired to another

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Name: The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Price: 12.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Mitch Albom

Mitch Albom

Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven kills its hero on page one. Eddie, eighty-three, an amusement-park maintenance man, dies under a falling ride car and wakes to five people who explain what his life was actually for. A 214-page parable about regret, meaning, and the hope buried in an ordinary working life.

The Review

Our take

Albom's argument is that nobody gets to grade their own life. Eddie spends eighty-three years certain he wasted his, stuck at Ruby Pier fixing the same rides his father fixed, a war behind him and a ruined leg that ended everything he had planned to do instead. Then a cable snaps. He dies trying to pull a child clear of a falling ride car, and the whole project of the book is to show him the ledger he was never permitted to see. Five people, one at a time, each of them there to correct one thing he had wrong.

The structure is almost mechanical, and it works because of that. Every encounter is bracketed by a flashback to one of Eddie's birthdays, and those short sections are the strongest writing in the novel. A birthday is a brutal day for a man carrying regrets, and Albom uses each one to show what got given up that year without anyone noticing. A job not taken. A trip postponed indefinitely. An argument nobody finished. Albom never lets one of these run long, two pages and sometimes less, and then we are back on the pier. By the fourth or fifth of them, the plain reporting has gathered a weight the afterlife scenes could never have carried alone.

The chapter with Marguerite is where the book stops being ingenious and becomes something better. I have read a good deal of fiction about long marriages and very little of it gets what Albom gets here, which is that the shape of a life together is set less by the big decisions than by all the hours spent waiting for someone to come home. She is given one specific complaint against Eddie and one specific mercy, and both of them land, because Albom has spent two hundred pages preparing the ground underneath them.

It is a simple book, and anyone who wants ambiguity or difficulty will find it thin. Albom writes short declarative sentences and says his themes out loud instead of burying them, and the theology is deliberately unaffiliated, nearer to a fable than to any particular church, with no doctrine in it and no requirement that a reader hold any belief at all to be moved by it. The complaint readers make most often is that the middle drags between encounters, and I felt that a little in the third and fourth meetings, where the pattern becomes visible before the payoff turns up. The plainness, though, is a decision rather than a shortfall. The first encounter, with a man Eddie never knew existed, sets a rule the rest of the novel follows without once cheating on it: the people your life touched are not the people you would ever have guessed.

Why you should read

Short parables about ordinary working lives
Loved Tuesdays with Morrie and want Albom's fiction
Grief reading that ends somewhere hopeful
Books you can finish in one long evening

What to expect

214 pages of plain sentences and fast reading
Birthday flashbacks set between each encounter
An unaffiliated afterlife, closer to fable than doctrine
A middle stretch that shows its pattern early

What I keep returning to is Eddie's hands. He spent sixty years with grease worked into his knuckles, tightening bolts and testing brakes on a boardwalk in the sun, and he reads those hands as the proof of a small life spent going nowhere. The book's entire quarrel is with that reading. Two hundred and fourteen pages later the same hands look like a record instead, one entry for every child who climbed off a ride safely and never had a name to thank.

Reviewed by Avery · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.7/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Five People You Meet in Heaven free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Five People You Meet in Heaven?: Yes. The Five People You Meet in Heaven has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mitch Albom.
Listen to The Five People You Meet in Heaven free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the The Five People You Meet in Heaven audiobook?: The The Five People You Meet in Heaven audiobook runs 4 hr 38 min.
How much does The Five People You Meet in Heaven cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $12.99, Paperback $6.48, Hardcover $8.54. Prices as of August 26, 2026 at 3:46 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is The Five People You Meet in Heaven about?: Albom's argument is that nobody gets to grade their own life. Eddie spends eighty-three years certain he wasted his, stuck at Ruby Pier fixing the same rides his father fixed, a war behind him and a ruined leg that ended everything he had planned to do instead. Then a cable snaps. He dies trying…
Is The Five People You Meet in Heaven worth reading?: We scored The Five People You Meet in Heaven 4.7 out of 5. Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven kills its hero on page one. Eddie, eighty-three, an amusement-park maintenance man, dies under a falling ride car and wakes to five people who explain what his life was actually for. A 214-page parable about regret, meaning, and…