...and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" (for an impossible chance to make amends or peace), draw a little from Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" and H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" (for the potential of a twist on the physical universe as we know it), on the upscale side borrow a bit from Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" (for clever paralleling of extremely different contexts), hark back to E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" (for commingling historical and fictional characters) and throw in a heady dollop of romantic mooning a la Robert James Waller's "The Bridges of Madison County," and you will have an inkling of the ingredients pulped together in "The Little Book."