The Heartbeat Library
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Narrated by:
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Kenichiro Thomson
About this listen
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.
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Story
The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.
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a great story!
- By cathryn vitek on 11-10-24
By: Daniel M. Lavery
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The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World
- A Novel
- By: Laura Imai Messina
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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When Yui loses both her mother and her daughter in the tsunami, she begins to mark the passage of time from that date onward: Everything is relative to March 11, 2011, the day the tsunami tore Japan apart and when grief took hold of her life. Yui struggles to continue on, alone with her pain. Then, one day she hears about a man who has an old disused telephone booth in his garden. There, those who have lost loved ones find the strength to speak to them and begin to come to terms with their grief. As news of the phone booth spreads, people travel to it from miles around.
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disappointed
- By Bequia on 10-13-23
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The Stone Witch of Florence
- By: Anna Rasche
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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1348. As the Black Plague ravages Italy, Ginevra di Gasparo is summoned to Florence after nearly a decade of lonely exile. Ginevra has a gift—harnessing the hidden powers of gemstones, she can heal the sick. But when word spread of her unusual abilities, she was condemned as a witch and banished. Now the same men who expelled Ginevra are begging for her return.
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Great read
- By Kim Sparling Leeman on 12-02-24
By: Anna Rasche
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Pearly Everlasting
- A Novel
- By: Tammy Armstrong
- Narrated by: Jean Ann Douglass
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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New Brunswick, 1934. When a cook in a logging camp finds an orphaned baby bear, he brings it home to his wife, who names the cub Bruno and raises him alongside her newborn daughter, Pearly. Growing up, Pearly and Bruno share a special bond and become inseparable. While life in the camp can be perilous—loggers are regularly injured or even killed—the Everlasting family form a close-knit community with the woodsmen, who accept and embrace the tame young bear.
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This is great writing but......
- By Kindle Customer on 01-16-25
By: Tammy Armstrong
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The Fox Wife
- A Novel
- By: Yangsze Choo
- Narrated by: Yangsze Choo
- Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.
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Brilliant storyteller!
- By BAE on 02-16-24
By: Yangsze Choo
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How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
- A Novel
- By: Anna Montague
- Narrated by: Cynthia Nixon
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She’s mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara’s prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara’s possessions. She’s fine. But in going through Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers her friend’s last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda’s upcoming seventieth birthday.
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Refreshing to have older character as protagonist
- By Lisamarie on 12-19-24
By: Anna Montague
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Women's Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Daniel M. Lavery
- Narrated by: Mara Wilson
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.
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a great story!
- By cathryn vitek on 11-10-24
By: Daniel M. Lavery
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We'll Prescribe You a Cat
- By: Syou Ishida, E. Madison Shimoda - translator
- Narrated by: Naruto Komatsu, Natsumi Kuroda
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Tucked away in an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can only be found by people who are struggling in their lives and genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take” their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.
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perfection
- By Theasophia on 09-05-24
By: Syou Ishida, and others
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The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife
- A Novel
- By: Anna Johnston
- Narrated by: Tim Carroll
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head—as long as his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.
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Somewhat engaging but predictable
- By RSNYC on 10-15-24
By: Anna Johnston
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Lifeform
- By: Jenny Slate
- Narrated by: Jenny Slate, George Saunders, Vanessa Bayer, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was rabid with fear of losing this love, because of past injury.
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Untethered
- By MyronK on 12-20-24
By: Jenny Slate
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The Lost Apothecary
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Penner
- Narrated by: Lorna Bennett, Lauren Anthony, Lauren Irwin
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Hidden in the depths of eighteenth-century London, a secret apothecary shop caters to an unusual kind of clientele. Women across the city whisper of a mysterious figure named Nella who sells well-disguised poisons to use against the oppressive men in their lives. But the apothecary’s fate is jeopardized when her newest patron, a precocious 12-year-old, makes a fatal mistake, sparking a string of consequences that echo through the centuries.
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Fell short
- By Heather on 03-06-21
By: Sarah Penner
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Tell Me Everything
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Strout
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”
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Very disappointed
- By Cheri on 09-11-24
By: Elizabeth Strout
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The Mighty Red
- A Novel
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his. Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker. Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels.
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Amazing!
- By Hollis Corwin on 10-07-24
By: Louise Erdrich
What listeners say about The Heartbeat Library
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- anonymous
- 01-26-25
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.
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