Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life spent fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. Just as the park has changed over the years, from Loop-the-Loop to Pipeline Plunge, Eddie has changed too, from an optimistic youth to a bitter old age. His days are a boring routine of work, loneliness and regrets. Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident while trying to save a little girl from a falling wagon. With his last 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 five people who were in it explain your earthly life to you. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever. One after another, Eddie's five people illuminate the invisible connections of his earthly life. As the story reaches its extraordinary conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the yet-unknown final act of his life: was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, coming from the most unlikely source, is as inspiring as a glimpse of heaven itself. These five encounters, some of them with people who are strangers to Eddie, others with people he knows intimately, take this gruff but kind man through the different stages of his life and through each new person, a hidden truth is revealed. As Albom tells Eddie's story, he gradually sheds light on the web of connections between each individual and a world of strangers, so that life reveals itself not as a simple story of what we have achieved but as a vast network, too big for us. perceive clearly from the inside.