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The First Phone Call from Heaven

Mitch Albom · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud

Ben Sherwood · 250 pages

The powerful bond between two brothers--one alive and the other killed in a terrible accident--unexpectedly transcends the barriers of life and death, and it is up to one enchanting woman to make their world right. Charlie St. Cloud's life has been haunted by the ghost of his younger brother, who was killed in a car wreck that Charlie miraculously survived.

AfterlifeFaith CrisisContemporary FictionSmall Town
❤️

Because of Winn-Dixie

Kate DiCamillo · 182 pages

Ten-year-old India Opal Buloni describes her first summer in the town of Naomi, Florida, and all the good things that happen to her becauThe summer Opal and her father, the preacher, move to Naomi, Florida, Opal goes into the Winn-Dixie supermarket—and comes out with a dog. A big, ugly, suffering dog with a sterling sense of humor. A dog she dubs Winn-Dixie. Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tel

Single FatherContemporary FictionSmall TownTearjerker
❤️

The Shack

William Paul Young · 252 pages

This book is a life changing in the way you think about a higher power and who,what,and why, He makes the decisions He does. It will make you think of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in a whole new way. An excellent read.

AfterlifeFaith CrisisContemporary FictionTearjerker
❤️

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin · 279 pages

A.J. Fikry's life is not what he expected it to be. His wife has died, his bookstore is failing, and his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. He is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island and from Amelia, the Knightley Press sales rep who refuses to be deterred by A.J.'s bad attitude. And then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore that gives A.J

Single FatherContemporary FictionSmall TownTearjerker
❤️

Dear John

Nicholas Sparks · 282 pages

John, a high school dropout, enlists in the Army not knowing what else to do with his life. While in the Army he meets Savannah, they fall in love and she awaits his return from the Army. After 9/11 John feels it's his duty to re-enlist. During their long separation Savannah falls in love and marries someone else.

Single FatherSmall TownContemporary FictionGrief and Mourning
🙂

Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

Todd Burpo, Lynn Vincent · 192 pages

Presents the story of the four-year old son of a Nebraska pastor who during emergency surgery slips from consciousness and enters heaven.

AfterlifeFaith CrisisTearjerkerUplifting
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Plainsong

Kent Haruf · 301 pages

Single FatherContemporary FictionSmall TownGrief and Mourning
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Single FatherContemporary FictionSmall TownHopeful
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The Dead Don't Dance

Charles Martin · 317 pages

Faith CrisisSmall TownContemporary FictionHopeful
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The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta · 355 pages

What if—whoosh, right now, with no explanation—a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down? That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has

Faith CrisisContemporary FictionSmall TownEnsemble Cast
🙂

Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

Fannie Flagg · 379 pages

Combining southern warmth with unabashed emotion and side-splitting hilarity, Fannie Flagg takes readers back to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where the most unlikely and surprising experiences of a high-spirited octogenarian inspire a town to ponder the age-old question: Why are we here?Life is the strangest thing. One minute, Mrs. Elner Shimfissle is up in her tree, picking figs, and the next thing

AfterlifeContemporary FictionSmall TownUplifting
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Empire Falls

Richard Russo · 483 pages

"Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion's widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke o

Single FatherContemporary FictionSmall TownEmotional
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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce · 355 pages

Harold Fry has recently retired and now, he doesn't do very much. Even mowing the lawn, like his wife Maureen tells him to do, seems too much work for him. When, one day, he recieves a lettre in a pink envelope, this lazyness changes. In it, his collegue from long time ago, Queenie Hennessy, tells him she is going to die soon from a cancer in a hospice at the other end of England. Harold, at first

Faith CrisisContemporary FictionTearjerkerGrief and Mourning
🙂

A Long Way Down

Nick Hornby · 352 pages

Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives. In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Nick Hornby tell

Single FatherContemporary FictionGrief and MourningHopeful
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The Art of Racing in the Rain

Garth Stein · 321 pages

Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing,

Single FatherContemporary FictionUpliftingHopeful
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The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

Faith CrisisSmall TownHopefulGrief and Mourning
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Vanishing Acts

Jodi Picoult · 418 pages

Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her widowed father, Andrew, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own search-and-rescue bloodhound, which she uses to find missing persons. But as Delia plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall. And then a policeman knocks on her door, revealing a secret that changes the worl

Single FatherContemporary FictionTearjerkerHopeful
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Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

Faith CrisisSmall TownGrief and MourningHopeful
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Before I Die

Jenny Downham · 332 pages

A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.

Single FatherContemporary FictionHopefulTearjerker
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A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving · 543 pages

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." So begins John Irving's new novel. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys - best friends - are playing ina Li

Faith CrisisSmall TownContemporary FictionTearjerker
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Ordinary Grace

William Kent Krueger · 320 pages

Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.

Faith CrisisSmall TownHopefulGrief and Mourning
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No Offense

Meg Cabot · 340 pages

Single FatherContemporary FictionSmall TownHeartwarming
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When I Found You

Catherine Ryan Hyde · 397 pages

While duck hunting one morning, childless, middle-aged Nathan McCann finds a newborn abandoned in the woods. To his shock, the child--wrapped in a sweater and wearing a tiny knitted hat--is still alive. To his wife's shock, Nathan wants to adopt the boy ... but the child's grandmother steps in. Nathan makes her promise, however, that one day she'll bring the boy to meet him so he can reveal that h

Single FatherContemporary FictionUpliftingGrief and Mourning
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The Amber Spyglass

Philip Pullman · 531 pages

In the astonishing finale to the His Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra and Will are in unspeakable danger. With help from Iorek Byrnison the armored bear and two tiny Gallivespian spies, they must journey to a dank and gray-lit world where no living soul has ever gone. All the while, Dr. Mary Malone builds a magnificent Amber Spyglass. An assassin hunts her down, and Lord Asriel, with a troop of shinin

AfterlifeFaith CrisisReligious IdentityMultiple POV

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