The Phone Box at the Edge of the World was a sweet and spiritual read, of loss, of love, of connectedness and of survival. A beautiful friendship blossoms between two users of the phone box, both suffering from huge familial losses.

The ‘Japanese Glossary’ is welcome but the ‘Reader’s Questions’ feels like an uninvited guest at an otherwise dignified wake. Flashing like the neon displays in Piccadilly Circus, they couldn’t have advertised things more clearly. I would like to thank NetGalley, Bonnier Books UK and the author Laura Imai Messina for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.Along the way, she meets Takeshi, who lost his wife, and whose young daughter, Hana, is mute following her mother’s death, and together they find Bell Gardia, the garden “on a hill in the middle of nowhere” with the wind phone.

There the old man finds the strength to speak to his late wife and begin to come to terms with his grief. Two bereft people find themselves seeking a garden at the top of a hill in Ōtsuchi, Japan, where a disconnected phone allows the grief-stricken to send their voices into the wind as they talk to those they have lost. The feeling of being connected provides those people with support to find the strength and power to move forward.Told in vignettes of memories, regrets, and everyday details, this novel is filled with both loss and discovery; though some doors close, another opens. That said, there is far more to celebrate than to bemoan within the pages of what is a stylish and carefully calibrated meditation upon the nature of loss, grief and the joyously restorative power of love. In March 2011, an earthquake off the coast of Japan caused an enormous tsunami that reached miles inland, killing an estimated 15,897 people. Her existence was confined to a mat, and she was joined in her grief by a man who carried around an empty picture frame, observing the world through its void. Author Mallery has created a delightful story of friendship between three women that also offers a variety of love stories as they fall in love, make mistakes, and figure out how to be the best—albeit still flawed—versions of themselves.

I enjoyed the different lives merging together over a shared feeling of grief, and the place that helps them heal. A lifelong bookworm, she aims to provide readers with literary inspiration in the form of book reviews, reading lists and more. Lucrurile care ajung să îți lipsească cel mai mult de la cei care se duc sunt tocmai fixurile lor, fleacurile, lucrurile deranjante. These snippets are lovely breathers, a chance for the reader to marvel at the tiny details that make up a life. For years, people have travelled to visit the phone box, to pick up the receiver and speak into the wind: to pass their messages to loved ones no longer with us.During these difficult times we face, it addresses questions that we might all have—how to connect with those we have loved and lost and how to allow ourselves to live and to love again. She moved to Tokyo at the age of twenty-three to perfect the language and has been permanently living in Japan ever since. Instead she finds Takeshi, a bereaved husband whose own daughter has stopped talking in the wake of her mother’s death. Und so tauchte ich in diese Geschichte ein, tief bewegt, tief berührt und mit unzähligen Tränen in den Augen und doch dem Gefühl der Zuversicht, der Geborgenheit und der Hoffnung und Liebe im Herzen. Inspired by her visit to “The Phone of the Wind” in 2011, Messina witnessed those who picked “up the receiver” to “talk to the dead” and shares that experience with us in her novel, together with a tender sagacity which is a credit to its author and a joy for the reader.