Mitch Albom is the picture of American health. His skin glows, his dark-brown eyes twinkle and his thick thatch of black hair springs away from his scalp with uncontrollable vigour.All of this despite the fact that he is just off an overnight flight from his home in Detroit.
His wife is still asleep upstairs (she travels with him on his press trips) and he is wearing what can only be described as daytime pyjamas -- a grey T-shirt and navy trousers -- and heartily slurps his coffee between enthusiastic bouts of conversation.
Albom's latest book, Have A Little Faith, is the first non-fiction he has written since Tuesdays With Morrie, which became the bestselling memoir of all time.
Have A Little Faith is already number one on the New York Times bestseller list and it's not surprising, considering the strong echoes it bears of Albom's first memoir.
The book tells the story of two very different men, from different faiths and more dramatically different backgrounds. One is the Reb, the 82-year-old pious Jewish rabbi, and the other is Henry, an ex-con Christian pastor who, in his own words, broke every single one of the 10 commandments. 
The story begins when the rabbi asks Albom to write his eulogy. Albom is taken aback, as he is not religious, and describes himself as having wandered from the faith he was brought up in. What's even more unusual is the rabbi was practically a stranger to him, someone he remembered from his childhood as a stern man of God.
But he doesn't feel he can say no, and so sets about meeting with the rabbi to get to know him a bit better.
At the time, Albom didn't think it would take very long. "When someone asks you for a eulogy you figure the end is near," he says in his thick New Jersey accent, which makes him sound like an extra from The Sopranos.
But it would be eight years before he would have to sit down and write that eulogy and, over the intervening time, he says he had the cynicism knocked out of him 'one slap at a time'.
"I had a lot of [cynicism] 10 years ago. I was very much a person who didn't want to hear about your faith and I didn't want to talk about my faith. I was very cynical about the whole faith deal and in America you can sometimes get that way because a lot is made of it."
What changed he says, was discovering faith could be more practical and less pious.
"In Detroit we have 100,000 abandoned buildings. Abandoned. Gone. Burned. It's like a nuclear bomb hit it. Henry would drive around these neighbourhoods knowing people were squatting in these places and he would put food on the hood of his car so they could see it -- hams and turkeys and juice -- and people would come running out and he would just feed them. And there was no quid pro quo; they didn't have to join the church. That's an act of faith. Feeding the hungry."
Likewise, the rabbi would telephone his congregants on a regular basis to see how they were doing, especially those who were older or alone.
"If you see enough of this -- and I could give you three hundred examples -- you feel like a fool for being cynical. It's easy to be cynical and snarky because then you're always right. It's easy to look down on people too as 'these idiots with their faith'. All you have to do is dismiss, but when you have to really consider and put yourself in their place, it's harder. It was very healthy for me. It's one of the reasons I continue to go all the time."
While the rabbi has passed away, Albom still sees Henry every day and is involved in various charities in Detroit, one being the Hole In The Roof foundation, which covers the costs of repairing run-down buildings and churches that shelter the homeless.
If round about now you're thinking a book about a rabbi and a pastor is not really up your street, I should mention that it is not up mine either (having no small amount of the aforementioned cynicism), but having read it, it felt more like an attempt to figure out how to live a 'better' life than how to go to Mass. It reads more like an earnest reminder that we only have one life than a doom-laden sermon from the pulpit.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons Albom is so popular (he has sold 28 million books) with such a broad demographic. His readers stretch from Oprah Winfrey viewers (she made a movie of Tuesdays With Morrie) to self-help-aisle-squatters to twentysomethings looking for meaning. Albom tells me he is approached every day by people who want to tell him their story of a sick relative or a dead loved one. I imagine it's just in America but, sure enough, during our interview a young man recognises Albom and waits patiently until we've finished, just so he can ask Albom to sign a birthday card for a friend.
Albom was born in 1958 in New Jersey and began working as a sports journalist in his 20s. In 1995 he came across his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. His visits with Schwartz during the remaining six months of his life became Tuesdays with Morrie, a small book that Albom wrote to raise money to cover the costs of Morrie's medical care. He had previously written two bestselling sports books, but struggled to find a publisher for this project. His own publisher told him it sounded "boring and depressing" and reminded him he was a sportswriter.
"We finally found a book publisher willing to do it and one of the prerequisites was they had to give us the money up front so that I could give it to Morrie. They printed 20,000 copies and I didn't even expect to sell those. I thought I'd do it as a favour then go back to my life as a sportswriter. As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you're busy making plans."
The book went on to spend four years on the New York Times bestseller list and now holds the record for the most successful memoir ever published.
Albom says everything changed for him when he met Morrie again. "When you have somebody from your young past that you see coming to an end, it is going to halt you in your tracks. I think until that point we always kid ourselves that we're not as old as we chronologically show up -- 'I'm the youngest 37-year-old on the planet. I'm going to live forever'."
That was the first time he stopped and asked himself the question, 'What are you doing with your life?' Then the book came out. "All of a sudden people were coming up and saying, 'My mom died of cancer and the last thing we did together was read your book and can I talk to you about her', and every day I was having these deep discussions with people in airports, in stores and on the street about the end of life. It was emotionally exhausting but it showed me how everybody in the world is walking around with some pain, some issue or some grief or sadness. Once you recognise that, you have to become more sensitive to people."
It's hard to avoid the theme of death in his books, even though he says they are more about life. "People will sometimes ask, 'Why are you so obsessed with death?' But what I've found is if you want to write a book about life and you really want people to actually consider the question, 'What's it about?' you have to remind them that it doesn't go on forever. What makes people really consider the theme 'what matters in life' is the shadow of its end. The spectre of death changes your values. People think differently when they really accept the fact that death is part of the picture and I learned that with Morrie through the simple sentence 'When you learn how to die you learn how to live'. All my books to some degree have contained that philosophy so I'm not really obsessed with death."
Considering he has taken an unexpected path from workaholic sportswriter to modern-day guru, he says the changes have not been as deep and meaningful as you might expect. "The biggest way I've changed is if I'm eating lunch at my house and if the phone rings upstairs in my office, I don't answer it. I never would have done that in a million years. It's just that change in priorities. I'm with the people I love. It's nothing important, but it's the most important.
"I'm surrounded by stories of how short life is or can be. I'd be a fool if I didn't listen to my own books and messages when so many people do."
Have A Little Faith ends with the inevitable delivery of the eulogy Albom has been writing in his head for eight years, but also a conclusion that the cynic in him has been struggling with all along -- there is comfort to be found in faith, something he says a lot of people are discovering in the current economic downturn.
"I didn't know it was going to be this climate when the book came out but I've seen it now in Detroit, because we have 30pc unemployment. I've seen people put their faith in the workplace and then everybody was losing their jobs. They would get fired, they would start calling the network and nobody wanted to talk to them; it was as if they had the plague. And where would they go? Back to their church, their synagogue, their communities they worked in. The church that I work with, Henry's church, the one thing there isn't a shortage of is volunteers. People come from everywhere because they say seeing people in these conditions makes them feel like theirs isn't so bad, which is a little bit of what faith is about too -- help those who are less fortunate and it will be its own reward."
One of the other conclusions he came to is that tolerance of all religions is more essential now than ever.
"This is a much loftier subject than my little book can address but I do think we are at a crossroads in human history where we are either going to turn with regard to faith and find a live and let live philosophy or we'll just wipe one another out. We will, because we have the weapons and we have the anger and we're living on that precipice right now. So this isn't a kumbaya message. It should be about finding what we have in common. We have to treat each other better because then we're both the same."
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