The Heartbeat Library

By: Laura Imai Messina, Lucy Rand - translator

Narrated by: Kenichiro Thomson

A tender, contemplative, and uplifting novel about grief, friendship, and the many ways we heal, by the internationally bestselling author of The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

On the peaceful Japanese island of Teshima there is a library where the heartbeats of visitors from all around the world are collected. In this small, isolated building, the pulses of people who are still alive or have already passed away continue to echo.

Several miles away, in the ancient city of Kamakura, two lonely souls meet: Shuichi, a forty-year-old illustrator, who returns to his hometown to fix up the house of his recently deceased mother, and eight-year-old Kenta, a child he finds wandering like a shadow around it.
Day by day, the trust between Shuichi and Kenta grows, until they discover they share a bond that will tie them together for life. Their journey will lead them to Teshima and to the library of heartbeats …

Unforgettable and touching, The Heartbeat Library is a story about loss and hope, pain and joy, reality and imagination, and the promise of healing and overcoming the odds thanks to the relationships we build and rediscover.

©2024 Laura Imai Messina / English translation ©2024 by Lucy Rand (P)2024 Bonnier Books UK

Book & narrator good, recording skips

It is both sad & gently happy. Lovely story beautifully written. I appreciated the narrator's reading & pronunciation of Japanese words. Thankfully some parts I dreaded were foreshadowing weren't. However something is wrong with the recording. It frequently skips at the beginning of sections. You can figure out from context what word got chopped but unclear if it skipped only a word or a sentence.