Over two million readers can’t be wrong. My daughter Kiara suggested The Midnight Library (Canongate 2020) by Matt Haig and it is the perfect holiday, new year read. Filled with magical realism, whimsy, poignant warmth, tenderness and optimism, this novel will leave you challenging your regrets and instead inviting new possibilities into your life.
Protagonist Nora feels lonely, unloved and worthless; she works in a banal and ordinary job and her cat has just died. It’s time, she decides, to end her life. But at the stroke of midnight on what should be her last day on earth, she instead gets another chance (or indeed, infinite chances) at changing her life through being transported to The Midnight Library, where she meets her childhood librarian who offers her a library full of books, each one a different version of the life she might have lived, if only she had made one of many singular different choices. Some of these choices are as small as taking a different train; some as large as choosing a different partner, but all lead to a life that is different from her own. Sometimes radically different, sometimes merely the tiniest of adjustments…but each different book/life has the butterfly effect so that many other things in her life, with her family and friends, have also changed, and not always for the better.
Fortunately, she can choose to slip out of her new chosen life the moment she becomes disappointed in it, which – it turns out – is surprisingly often. Who knew that happiness could be so elusive? That one small decision could have so many ripple effects? That wanting one thing means the exclusion of other things you take for granted?
The Midnight Library offers Nora infinite choices…but faced with such a magnitude of decisions, which is the right one?
This novel is a beautiful, heart-warming story about life and love, ambition and dreams. It’s a cautionary fable about the carefulness of wishes, and a thoughtful meditation on making the most of what life has given you while also never giving up on aiming for better things. A lovely, gentle, easy-to-read book.