Book cover of The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

Book description

Laura Imai Messina’s international bestselling novel is a story about grief, mourning, and the joy of survival, inspired by a real phone booth in Japan with its disconnected “wind” phone, a place of pilgrimage and solace since the 2011 tsunami.

When Yui loses both her mother and her daughter in…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I love to travel, most especially to Asia and Southeast Asia, and am drawn to novels from, about, and based in those parts of the globe.

The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World was particularly intriguing to me as it is a fictional story focusing on a real place that I had read about after Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The author's imagination was sparked by a disconnected old black telephone in a phone booth—a "Wind Phone"—installed on a high hill, offering people the chance to communicate with lost loved ones; their voices carried into the wind.

Beautifully…

Everyone is going to die. Everyone knows that, and very few deal with it.

Even though we know it’s going to happen, thinking about it and preparing is always postponed. This book introduces us to a uniquely meaningful way to deal with death. It is also a love story.

It was first written in Italian, translated to English, and is set in Japan. All these make for a different and very useful view of how to deal with death.

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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