The Midnight Library by Matt Haig intrigued me right from the title. I hadn’t read any of Haig’s work before, and was deeply surprised by the humanity of what I found between the covers. His writing is straightforward and modest, but what it conveys is utterly exquisite.
We begin with Nora, exactly “nineteen years before she decided to die,” and immediately the countdown toward death is on. But as we are about to find out, death is not necessarily an ending to all things. Not when the midnight library exists.
“Between life and death there is a library,” and within it is the opportunity to live again.
We follow Nora on a journey through her own regrets and into the lives she could have lived if she’d chosen differently at every turning point in her dismal existence.
As Nora tries out life as an Olympian, an Arctic researcher, and a pub-owner among others, she realises, to her great surprise, that she doesn’t want to die after all. But there is still the matter of what kind of life she wants to live.
For having entered the library, she is given the choice of any life she likes. A chance to reverse every regret, achieve things she has always wanted, be whoever she so choses.
The journey provides such a keen insight to the human condition, an empathy for the beauty of an ordinary life, and an inevitable examination of self.
Haig weaves such a deep and profound tale with ease and simplicity, and as a reader I couldn’t help but feel that it transformed not only Nora, but me as well. My world shifted and my eyes opened, right there alongside Nora as she chooses what kind of life was for her.
The Midnight Library is an easy read that will prise open your very soul.
What would you change if you could undo your deepest regrets?
