The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Nora’s life has been going from bad to worse. Then at the stroke of midnight on her last day on earth she finds herself transported to a library. There she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived.

The premise of The Midnight Library is one which appeals to many of us – the chance to test the consequences of a decision before making it.

Unfortunately, though, the circumstances which have led Nora to the Midnight Library are unhappy. She feels like a failure and she ruminates on all of the things she could have achieved but hasn’t. She feels as though she has nothing left to live for so she takes matters into her own hands. To her surprise, though, she is transported to a limbo between life and death: the Midnight Library. Here, each book represents a different version of the lives she could have led if she had made different decisions in the past, and she can choose which ones to explore.

I like the form of magical realism Haig has chosen here – where the story is set in the real world and the only ‘magic’ aspect is a secret to the protagonist. In each world Nora enters, nobody knows that she hasn’t been there all along, which can lead to difficulties when she is assumed to know who certain people are, or when she is expected to dive into a task which everyone thinks she is familiar with but which she has never actually done before!

I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I had made different choices in the past. As Nora finds out, even small or ostensibly unimportant changes could have led to a significantly different life. The Midnight Library felt like a safe space to immerse myself in imagining the consequences of my own potential lives whilst reading about Nora’s. When you’re in Nora’s state of mind, it feels as though any other life would be better than your current one, but she sees both the good and bad sides of what could have been, giving her a clearer perspective about her existing life.

In typical Matt Haig style, The Midnight Library is an easy but thought-provoking read.