Related category
The Midnight Library
A Novel
After a succession of losses and disappointments, Nora Seed concludes that her life has become unbearable. She awakens in the Midnight Library, a realm between life and death where every volume contains a life she might have led had she chosen differently. Guided by her former school librarian, Mrs. Elm, Nora enters alternate realities shaped by abandoned ambitions, relationships, and opportunities. Yet success, love, adventure, and recognition prove more complicated than they appeared from a distance. Matt Haig uses this speculative premise to examine regret, depression, possibility, and the difficulty of judging a life from imagined alternatives. The novel is ultimately less interested in finding a flawless existence than in asking how a person might recover curiosity about an unfinished one.