Categories | Science Fiction |
Author | Matt Haig |
Publisher | Penguin Books (May 9, 2023) |
Language | English |
Paperback | 304 pages |
Item Weight | 8 ounces |
Dimensions |
5.1 x 0.8 x 7.7 inches |
I. Book introduction
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
Plot
Nora Seed is unhappy with her choices in life as a sixteen-year-old and remains unhappy nineteen years later. Her best friend, Izzy, is in Australia; she has just been fired; her relationship with her brother, Joe, is sour; her music teaching gig is seemingly cancelled; and her cat has just died. Nora feels as if she is useless to the world. During the night, she attempts suicide via overdose, but ends up in a limbo library, known as the Midnight Library, managed by her school librarian, Mrs. Elm. The library is situated between life and death with millions of books filled with stories of her life had she made some different decisions. In this library, with Mrs. Elm’s help, she tries to find the life in which she’s the most content. However, the only lives she can access are those that are possible, so she cannot find a life where her cat is alive (due to his restrictive cardiomyopathy).
In one possible life, she reunites with her boyfriend, Dan, and finds herself married to him, but it is not the way she expected. Neither of them are happy with their lives, even after accomplishing Dan’s dream of owning a pub. She visits a life in which she lives in Australia to be with Izzy. However, Izzy had died in a car crash years earlier. She then tries a potential life in which she becomes an Olympic swimmer. However, she finds it unfulfilling and messes up her TED talk. She sees herself in a world where she is a glaciologist doing research in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic – a very different life from the one she tried to escape, but not necessarily a better choice.
While in Svalbard, she meets another limbo traveler, Hugo Lefevre, who is used to traveling around different lives, and has a brief relationship with him. Her encounter with a polar bear makes her realize she does not really want to die as much as she thought she did. Her next life features her in a successful band, originally formed with Joe. Yet, its glories fade when she finds out he died years ago and that she has broken up with a famous movie star whom she idolized in her root life.
She experiences several other lives with several other people, finally settling on a life where she majors in Philosophy and is married to Ash, a surgeon who bought guitar books from her in her root life, and buried Nora’s cat while she was grieving. She also has a daughter named Molly. Through Molly, she learns to love again. This life, by far, seems the best of the lot, but she remains terrified of returning to the Midnight Library. She notices that the boy she tutored in piano, Leo, is now constantly in trouble with the police because there was no piano tutor to help him find something he was passionate about; her neighbor she supplied with medicine does not know her; and she feels completely lost.
She returns to the Midnight Library, despite her resisting, which is collapsing due to her original body dying. Realizing she isn’t ready to die, she says a goodbye to Mrs. Elm and finds a book withstanding the destruction. She writes I AM ALIVE inside of it before everything disappears. She wakes up in her original life with a newfound understanding of life, but she is still suffering from the overdose from the night before. She manages to get to the hospital with the help of her neighbor. Her brother comes to visit from London after being notified by the hospital and the two reconcile. She receives a text from Izzy and the two plan a visit together. Nora notices Ash and plans to talk to him sometime, and she resumes her piano lessons with Leo. She finally meets her former librarian in a nursing home and the two play a game of chess.
Editorial Reviews
- “Whimsical.” —Washington Post, named one of the 15 Feel-Good Books Guaranteed to Lift Your Spirits
- “An absorbing but comfortable read…a vision of limitless possibility, of new roads taken, of new lives lived, of a whole different world available to us somehow, somewhere, might be exactly what’s wanted in these troubled and troubling times.” —The New York Times
- “Charming…a celebration of the ordinary: ordinary revelations, ordinary people, and the infinity of worlds seeded in ordinary choices.” —The Guardian
- “A brilliant premise and great fun.”—Daily Mail
- “This book really makes you think all about our choices in life and that big question of “Where would I be if I had made a different choice?” It’s a book that definitely made me self-reflect.” ―Millie Bobbie Brown, actor and author of Nineteen Steps
- “I can’t describe how much his work means to me. So necessary…[Matt Haig is] the king of empathy.” —Jameela Jamil, actor and host of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil
- “A beautiful fable, an It’s a Wonderful Life for the modern age – impossibly timely when we are all stuck in a world we wish could be different.” —Jodi Picoult, author of My Sister’s Keeper
- “This brainy, captivating pleasure read feels like what you might get if TV’s The Good Place collided with Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” —People
- “Thanks to the storytelling chops of writer Matt Haig, The Midnight Library is an engaging read, full of gentle insights and soothing wisdom… This is a book about shedding regret by gaining perspective. It’s full of quirky plot lines, with glimpses of opportunities and potential in unexpected places and people.” —Psychology Today
- “A charming book.” —Dolly Parton, award-winning singer-songwriter
- “Although I don’t read fiction as much as I used to—because I’m always writing fiction—during these sad and difficult days in 2020 I broke that rule because I needed to escape into other people’s fictional worlds. One of my favorite books of the year was “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig, a powerful and uplifting story about regrets and the choices we make.” —Alice Hoffman, author of Magic Lessons and Practical Magic
- “Clever, emotional and thought-inspiring.” —Jenny Colgan, author of The Bookshop on the Corner
- “Amazing and utterly beautiful, The Midnight Library is everything you’d expect from the genius storyteller who is Matt Haig.” —Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
- “Nora’s life is burdened by regrets. Then she stumbles on a library with books that enable her to test out the lives she could have led, including as a glaciologist, Olympic swimmer, rock star, and more. Her discoveries ultimately prove life-affirming in Matt Haig’s dazzling fantasy.” —Christian Science Monitor
- “Would we really make better choices if we could step back in time? Matt Haig’s thought-provoking, uplifting new book, The Midnight Library discusses just that, exploring our relationship with regret and what really makes a perfect life.” —Harper’s Bazaar (UK)
- “British author Matt Haig is beloved in his home country, and he’s a champion of mental health, which makes him a great person to follow on Twitter. He’s best known for the novel How to Stop Time, but he has a new novel just out on September 29 called The Midnight Library, which sounds equally intriguing. In this library, Nora Seed finds endless books which contain different versions of the life she could have lived. This is a must-read for those of us given to endless what ifs.” —BookRiot
- “Haig is one of the most inspirational popular writers on mental health of our age and, in his latest novel, he has taken a clever, engaging concept and created a heart-warming story that offers wisdom in the same deceptively simple way as Mitch Albom’s best tales.” —Independent (UK)
- “Just beautiful . . . Such a gorgeous, gorgeous book.” —Fearne Cotton, host of the BBC Radio 1 Chart Show
- “A highly original, thought-provoking novel…” — Independent (London)
- “[The Midnight Library] will follow in the bestselling footsteps of Haig’s earlier books . . . Part Sliding Doors, part-philosophical quest, this is a moving novel with a powerful mental health message at its heart.” —Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller
- “Haig’s latest (after the nonfiction collection Notes on a Nervous Planet, 2019) is a stunning contemporary story that explores the choices that make up a life, and the regrets that can stifle it. A compelling novel that will resonate with readers.” —Booklist (starred review)
- “Charming…[Matt Haig] will reward readers who take this book off the shelf.” —Publisher’s Weekly
About the Author (Matt Haig)
Matt Haig is an author for children and adults. His memoir Reasons to Stay Alive was a number one bestseller, staying in the British top ten for 46 weeks. His children’s book A Boy Called Christmas was a runaway hit and is translated in over 40 languages. It is being made into a film starring Maggie Smith, Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent and The Guardian called it an ‘instant classic’. His novels for adults include the award-winning How To Stop Time, The Radleys, The Humans and the number one bestseller The Midnight Library.
Matt Haig was born on 3 July 1975 in Sheffield. He grew up in the Nottinghamshire town of Newark and later went on to study English and History at the University of Hull.
As of 2015, Haig is married to Andrea Semple, and they live in Brighton, Sussex, with their two children and a dog. The children were homeschooled.
Haig identifies as an atheist. He has said that books are his one true faith, and the library is his church.
Some of Haig’s work — especially part of the non-fiction books — is inspired by the mental breakdown he suffered from when he was 24-years-old. He still occasionally suffers from anxiety. He has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism.
II. Reviewer: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
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1. PAROMJIT reviews The Midnight Library
It is no secret that Matt Haig has mental health issues, dogged by the darkness of depression that has taken its toll on his life. His acute observations and experience of his condition informs this exquisite, inspiring, compassionate and empathetic novel where he creates the concept of the midnight library, to be found in the spaces between life and death, to explore life, the issues that afflict our world, through philosophy and more, endeavouring to tease out what might make life worth living and a joy and what gives it meaning. The device used to implement his goal is the ordinary Nora Seed, who has lived her life trying to please others, who has hit rock bottom, suffering the loss of her cat, her job, overwhelmed by the burden of a lifetime of regrets, seeing no light in her life whatsoever. She is tempted by thoughts of suicide that has her ending up at the midnight library.
The midnight library is magical, for a start, the library has a limitless number of books, and these books are far from ordinary, Haig sprinkles gold dust in each book, offering Nora the opportunity to see how her life would have turned out if each and every decision at every point in her life had been different. The books illustrate the endless possibilities that life holds for Nora and all of us. Nora explores each book, with inquisitiveness and curiosity, the widely disparate lives that could have been hers, no easy task as she has to slip into each new life with the complications of being unfamiliar with it and do so without alerting the other people present. It soon becomes clear that there are pros and cons to each book/life, to each decision and choice made, each life containing its own mix of despair, pain and regrets that must be accommodated and handled.
Haig offers a touching narrative that speaks of the joys to be found in living, attained through Nora’s eyes as she tries to untangle what really matters in life, putting life in context and perspective with all its ongoing changes, complexities, and an understanding no life is perfect in itself. In some ways, this is a version of It’s A Wonderful Life, a favourite film for so many people. What I was so struck by is just how many readers might find this helpful for our lock down times, so many have suffered unbearable losses and illness, have had to face not seeing all those we love and mean so much to us, whilst being weighed down with worries and concerns about how to cope with fears regarding jobs, childcare, money and more. A beautifully nuanced novel that I am sure many will love as much as me. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.
2. RUBY GRANER reviews The Midnight Library
okay WOW. This was amazing.
I must say that I was kind of skeptical? going into this because the idea is SO good that I didn’t know if the writing would be able to live up to it (which can sometimes happen)… but alas, no! Haig’s prose is fast-paced and easy to read, but also believable and deeply philosophical. There is just so much to learn from this book. I mean, you COULD read a self-help book on stoicism, or you could just read this 🙂
3. MEREDITH reviews The Midnight Library
Magical
“Let’s be kind to the people in our own existence.”
The Midnight Library is a book about choices, regrets, and embracing life.
Nora Seed is having a really bad day. She is mugged, loses her job, blamed for other’s people’s failures, and her cat is run over by a car. She is also seriously depressed. This day is one of many bad days that Nora has experienced over the last decade of her life. She can’t take life anymore and attempts suicide.
Nora wakes up to discover that she is in the space between life and death known as The Midnight Library. Here, Nora is given the opportunity to take the paths she didn’t choose and undo her regrets. She travels into the multiverse, getting to experience her other lives. What she finds is that the grass isn’t always greener, and in order to live, one must push aside their regrets and embrace their potential.
“She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.
There are many versions of Nora, but she finds she is the same person in every life she chooses. She might be happier, but she doesn’t have what she needs, which is love. She cannot heal until she can open up and accept the love of others, but also love herself and recognize her value.
I love Nora’s character. I felt all of her emotions, the dark, and the light. She is fragile, desperate, adventurous, a rockstar, a loving sister, a good friend, a kind neighbor, a good teacher, and, most importantly, a survivor.
This is my first book by Matt Haig and I love how he weaves in bits of magic, fantasy, and whimsy alongside Quantum physics, literature, and philosophy.
This is an emotional read. Reading about a character who is in such a desperate state of mind that they attempt to take their life wasn’t easy, but the other side of this book offers a lot of love, warmth, compassion, and healing. It was surprisingly heartwarming and uplifting. Nora’s story inspired me to turn off the channel of regrets that often fill my head and embrace the here and now.
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and Penguin Group in exchange for an honest review.
4. MATTHEW reviews The Midnight Library
This is the ultimate “what if I had done it differently?” story. I guarantee it will make you think and might give you some new perspective on life. Also, while it starts a bit dark, I think people who are looking for a way out of a dark place might find this story uplifting overall.
I have been sitting here thinking about how to review this book and I don’t want to say too much about it because after 10 pages or so, everything little thing would be a spoiler! That, in itself, should probably pique your interest; it is so packed with interconnected and surprising content I can barely even talk about it! So, just read it because all the stuff that happens is totally worth it . . . I’ll leave it at that.
I was hooked by this book from page one. It is not a long book and because it was written so well, it flew right by. If you are looking for a well written and unique story that I believe will appeal to people with a wide variety of interests, The Midnight Library is worth giving a try.
5. JOSHUANIMMO89 reviews The Midnight Library
What Life Do You Want?
The synopsis of this book and the buzz surrounding it made me want to read it and see what all the fuss was about. I’m definitely glad I did! It’s such an interesting concept and handled very well by Haig. What could have been a convoluted, confusing attempt at fantasy was clearly written and extremely effective in it’s storytelling.
Was it a little too feel-goody? A little too message-y and cliche in it’s message? Sure. But is there really anything wrong with a feel good, happy ending to a novel? Does the ending have to be depressing to be effective? I don’t think so. I think the ending was the perfect result for the story I read, and I appreciated the author going in that direction.
6. M reviews The Midnight Library
I enjoyed the premise and I was interested in the main character. I suspected it would end in a predictable scenario but along the way I hoped it would continue on the course it was at a particular stage. Yet that remained a possibility even when it didn’t. I liked the writing and will be reading the second most popular book by this author, The Midnight Library being the most highly regarded by far.
I wasn’t familiar with Matt Haig and decided to read this book having searched around for something highly rated that sounded interesting. By the time I had completed the book I would have bet it was written by a woman. I did not refresh my memory of the author and unlike a physical book you have to go out of your way to see the cover and author’s name when reading on a kindle. So apparently Matt is not a pen name used by a woman. So much for that notion.
7. STEVEN HILDRETH, JR reviews The Midnight Library
A Masterclass in Characterization, Philosophy, & Introspection
A friend loaned me Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library with the strong recommendation that I read it.
My usual reading genres are action thrillers (both to support friends & to keep abreast of trends in the genre), military & geopolitical non-fiction (as research for my own work), and crime thrillers (to learn the genre so that I may write such a work myself someday). That said, I’ve long stated that a good story is a good story, regardless of genre, and any book that has the right stuff will compel me to turn the page.
The Midnight Library definitely has the right stuff.
It tells the story of Nora Seed, a young woman living the adage of, “When it rains, it pours.” One particular day rains harder than the rest, and she decides to succumb to suicidal ideations.
Only, once she has committed the action, she finds herself in a massive library, tended to by her old school librarian. The librarian tells Nora this library is different from any other she has encountered. It is a collection of the infinite possibilities one faces in their lives, each book the culmination of choices made. She can live as many lives as she wants until one of two things happens: she finds the life that she’s been looking for; or the time reaches 12:01 AM, at which point, her root life will have expired.
The Midnight Library is a compelling masterclass in characterization, philosophy, and introspection. It is easy to relate to Nora because most of us have been Nora: down on our luck, full of regret, and questioning our existence. Through Nora’s journey, the reader is subtly invited to inspect their own lives, wonder what they would do in Nora’s position, the choices they would make differently in life.
I would definitely recommend this book to all. It is a study of the human condition that will leave the reader full of thought upon its conclusion.
8. JEANNE reviews The Midnight Library
A book for thought!
A friend recommended The Midnight Library to me after I’d been telling her stories of my life. She inevitably asked the question – do I have any regrets? I said, oh, hundreds, no, thousands!! And I told her of my internal mind game of playing “sliding doors” with “what if” scenarios. I’d never heard of the book, but got the Kindle version immediately. I’m glad I did; I can see a lot of myself in the character of Nora Seed. Her experiences in The Midnight Library have given me some perspectives to think about when I play my own “what if” games, and as I navigate the rest of my life. I definitely recommend it.
9. DANIELLE reviews The Midnight Library
It’s incredibly rare that I come across a book that ticks all my boxes. Good characters. Great setting. Wonderful story. This book really lived up to the hype! 🤗 Nora Seed has regrets. In a moment of absolute darkness she decides she’s done with life. Trigger warning: suicide attempt. 😬 She’s pushed into The Midnight Library, where her school librarian greets her and explains the books of regret. Nora opens a book and lives a life had she done things differently. Book after book, life after life, she discovers who she could have been. ❤️ This book was beautifully magical and inspiring. I’d recommend this to anyone and everyone!! It is AMAZING!! ❤️📚
10. JESSICA reviews The Midnight Library
‘if you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. aim to be you… the truest version of you.’
quietly profound and deeply meaningful.
very ‘the five people you meet in heaven’ with a magical, bookish feel. perfect for anyone who had ever wondered if their life is enough.
III. The Midnight Library Quotes by Matt Haig
The best book quotes from The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
“‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’”
“‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely.”
“‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘You must always remember that.’”
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”“The only way to learn is to live.”
“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
“We only need to be one person.
We only need to feel one existence.
We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”
“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”
“Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.
She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.”“Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.”
“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”
“And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”
“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”
“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”
“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch for ever.”
“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”
“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”
“Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”
“Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all”
“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
“That was how she had felt most of her life.
Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”“Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’
‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities…In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living…never underestimate the big importance of small things.”“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”
“Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.
She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.
She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.
She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying her best.
And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.”“Do you ever think “how did I end up here?” Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it’s all your fault because you were the one who made every turn? And you know that there are many routes that could have helped you out, because you hear all the people on the outside of the maze who made it through, and they are laughing and smiling. And sometimes you get a glimpse of them through the hedge. A fleeting shape through the leaves. And they seem so damn happy to have made it and you don’t resent them, but you do resent yourself for not having their ability to work it all out. Do you? Or is this maze just for me?”
“So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.”
“Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.”
“To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”
Excerpted from The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
A Conversation About Rain
Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene School in the town of Bedford. She sat at a low table staring at a chess board.
‘Nora dear, it’s natural to worry about your future,’ said the librarian, Mrs Elm, her eyes twinkling.
Mrs Elm made her first move. A knight hopping over the neat row of white pawns. ‘Of course, you’re going to be worried about the exams. But you could be anything you want to be, Nora. Think of all that possibility. It’s exciting.’
‘Yes. I suppose it is.’
‘A whole life in front of you.’
‘A whole life.’
‘You could do anything, live anywhere. Somewhere a bit less cold and wet.’
Nora pushed a pawn forward two spaces.
It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction. For instance, when she was a baby her mother had been so worried Nora’s left ear stuck out more than her right that she’d used sticky tape to address the situation, then disguised it beneath a woollen bonnet.
‘I hate the cold and wet,’ added Mrs Elm, for emphasis.
Mrs Elm had short grey hair and a kind and mildly crinkled oval face sitting pale above her turtle-green polo neck. She was quite old. But she was also the person most on Nora’s wavelength in the entire school, and even on days when it wasn’t raining she would spend her afternoon break in the small library.
‘Coldness and wetness don’t always go together,’ Nora told her. ‘Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. Technically, it’s a desert.’
‘Well, that sounds up your street.’
‘I don’t think it’s far enough away.’
‘Well, maybe you should be an astronaut. Travel the galaxy.’
Nora smiled. ‘The rain is even worse on other planets.’
‘Worse than Bedfordshire?’
‘On Venus it is pure acid.’
Mrs Elm pulled a paper tissue from her sleeve and delicately blew her nose. ‘See? With a brain like yours you can do anything.’
A blond boy Nora recognised from a couple of years below her ran past outside the rain-speckled window. Either chasing someone or being chased. Since her brother had left, she’d felt a bit unguarded out there. The library was a little shelter of civilisation.
‘Dad thinks I’ve thrown everything away. Now I’ve stopped swimming.’
‘Well, far be it from me to say, but there is more to this world than swimming really fast. There are many different possible lives ahead of you. Like I said last week, you could be a glaciologist. I’ve been researching and the-‘
And it was then that the phone rang.
‘One minute,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘I’d better get that.’
A moment later, Nora watched Mrs Elm on the phone. ‘Yes. She’s here now.’ The librarian’s face fell in shock. She turned away from Nora, but her words were audible across the hushed room: ‘Oh no. No. Oh my God. Of course . . .’
Nineteen Years Later
The Man at the Door
Twenty-seven hours before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat on her dilapidated sofa scrolling through other people’s happy lives, waiting for something to happen. And then, out of nowhere, something actually did.
Someone, for whatever peculiar reason, rang her doorbell.
She wondered for a moment if she shouldn’t get the door at all. She was, after all, already in her night clothes even though it was only nine p.m. She felt self-conscious about her over-sized ECO WORRIER T-shirt and her tartan pyjama bottoms.
She put on her slippers, to be slightly more civilised, and discovered that the person at the door was a man, and one she recognised.
He was tall and gangly and boyish, with a kind face, but his eyes were sharp and bright, like they could see through things.
It was good to see him, if a little surprising, especially as he was wearing sports gear and he looked hot and sweaty despite the cold, rainy weather. The juxtaposition between them made her feel even more slovenly than she had done five seconds earlier.
But she’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.
‘Ash,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s Ash, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It is.’
‘What are you doing here? It’s good to see you.’
A few weeks ago she’d been sat playing her electric piano and he’d run down Bancroft Avenue and had seen her in the window here at 33A and given her a little wave. He had once – years ago – asked her out for a coffee. Maybe he was about to do that again.
‘It’s good to see you too,’ he said, but his tense forehead didn’t show it.
When she’d spoken to him in the shop, he’d always sounded breezy, but now his voice contained something heavy. He scratched his brow. Made another sound but didn’t quite manage a full word.
‘You running?’ A pointless question. He was clearly out for a run. But he seemed relieved, momentarily, to have something trivial to say.
‘Yeah. I’m doing the Bedford Half. It’s this Sunday.’
‘Oh right. Great. I was thinking of doing a half-marathon and then I remembered I hate running.’
This had sounded funnier in her head than it did as actual words being vocalised out of her mouth. She didn’t even hate running. But still, she was perturbed to see the seriousness of his expression. The silence went beyond awkward into something else.
‘You told me you had a cat,’ he said eventually.
‘Yes. I have a cat.’
‘I remembered his name. Voltaire. A ginger tabby?’
‘Yeah. I call him Volts. He finds Voltaire a bit pretentious. It turns out he’s not massively into eighteenth-century French philosophy and literature. He’s quite down-to-earth. You know. For a cat.’
Ash looked down at her slippers.
‘I’m afraid I think he’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘He’s lying very still by the side of the road. I saw the name on the collar, I think a car might have hit him. I’m sorry, Nora.’
She was so scared of her sudden switch in emotions right then that she kept smiling, as if the smile could keep her in the world she had just been in, the one where Volts was alive and where this man she’d sold guitar songbooks to had rung her doorbell for another reason.
Ash, she remembered, was a surgeon. Not a veterinary one, a general human one. If he said something was dead it was, in all probability, dead.
‘I’m so sorry.’
Nora had a familiar sense of grief. Only the sertraline stopped her crying. ‘Oh God.’
She stepped out onto the wet cracked paving slabs of Bancroft Avenue, hardly breathing, and saw the poor ginger-furred creature lying on the rain-glossed tarmac beside the kerb. His head grazed the side of the pavement and his legs were back as if in mid-gallop, chasing some imaginary bird.
‘Oh Volts. Oh no. Oh God.’
She knew she should be experiencing pity and despair for her feline friend – and she was – but she had to acknowledge something else. As she stared at Voltaire’s still and peaceful expression – that total absence of pain – there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness.
Envy.
String Theory
Nine and a half hours before she decided to die, Nora arrived late for her afternoon shift at String Theory.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told Neil, in the scruffy little windowless box of an office. ‘My cat died. Last night. And I had to bury him. Well, someone helped me bury him. But then I was left alone in my flat and I couldn’t sleep and forgot to set the alarm and didn’t wake up till midday and then had to rush.’
This was all true, and she imagined her appearance – including make-up-free face, loose makeshift ponytail and the same second-hand green corduroy pinafore dress she had worn to work all week, garnished with a general air of tired despair – would back her up.
Neil looked up from his computer and leaned back in his chair. He joined his hands together and made a steeple of his index fingers, which he placed under his chin, as if he was Confucius contemplating a deep philosophical truth about the universe rather than the boss of a musical equipment shop dealing with a late employee. There was a massive Fleetwood Mac poster on the wall behind him, the top right corner of which had come unstuck and flopped down like a puppy’s ear.
‘Listen, Nora, I like you.’
Neil was harmless. A fifty-something guitar aficionado who liked cracking bad jokes and playing passable old Dylan covers live in the store.
‘And I know you’ve got mental-health stuff.’
‘Everyone’s got mental-health stuff.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’m feeling much better, generally,’ she lied. ‘It’s not clinical. The doctor says it’s situational depression. It’s just that I keep on having new . . . situations. But I haven’t taken a day off sick for it all. Apart from when my mum . . . Yeah. Apart from that.’
Neil sighed. When he did so he made a whistling sound out of his nose. An ominous B flat. ‘Nora, how long have you worked here?’
‘Twelve years and . . .’ – she knew this too well – ‘. . . eleven months and three days. On and off.’
‘That’s a long time. I feel like you are made for better things. You’re in your late thirties.’
‘I’m thirty-five.’
‘You’ve got so much going for you. You teach people piano . . .’
‘One person.’
He brushed a crumb off his sweater.
‘Did you picture yourself stuck in your hometown working in a shop? You know, when you were fourteen? What did you picture yourself as?’
‘At fourteen? A swimmer.’ She’d been the fastest fourteen-year-old girl in the country at breaststroke and second-fastest at freestyle. She remembered standing on a podium at the National Swimming Championships.
‘So, what happened?’
She gave the short version. ‘It was a lot of pressure.’
‘Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.’
She didn’t correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn’t tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.
She smoothed a stray strand of her coal-black hair up towards her ponytail.
‘What are you saying, Neil?’
‘It’s never too late to pursue a dream.’
‘Pretty sure it’s too late to pursue that one.’
‘You’re a very well qualified person, Nora. Degree in Philosophy . . .’
Nora stared down at the small mole on her left hand. That mole had been through everything she’d been through. And it just stayed there, not caring. Just being a mole. ‘Not a massive demand for philosophers in Bedford, if I’m honest, Neil.’
‘You went to uni, had a year in London, then came back.’
‘I didn’t have much of a choice.’
Nora didn’t want a conversation about her dead mum. Or even Dan. Because Neil had found Nora’s backing out of a wedding with two days’ notice the most fascinating love story since Kurt and Courtney.
‘We all have choices, Nora. There’s such a thing as free will.’
‘Well, not if you subscribe to a deterministic view of the universe.’
‘But why here?’
‘It was either here or the Animal Rescue Centre. This paid better. Plus, you know, music.’
‘You were in a band. With your brother.’
‘I was. The Labyrinths. We weren’t really going anywhere.’
‘Your brother tells a different story.’
This took Nora by surprise. ‘Joe? How do you-‘
‘He bought an amp. Marshall DSL40.’
‘When?’
‘Friday.’
‘He was in Bedford?’
‘Unless it was a hologram. Like Tupac.’
He was probably visiting Ravi, Nora thought. Ravi was her brother’s best friend. While Joe had given up the guitar and moved to London, for a crap IT job he hated, Ravi had stuck to Bedford. He played in a covers band now, called Slaughterhouse Four, doing pub gigs around town.
‘Right. That’s interesting.’
Nora was pretty certain her brother knew Friday was her day off. The fact prodded her from inside.
‘I’m happy here.’
‘Except you aren’t.’
He was right. A soul-sickness festered within her. Her mind was throwing itself up. She widened her smile.
‘I mean, I am happy with the job. Happy as in, you know, satisfied. Neil, I need this job.’
‘You are a good person. You worry about the world. The homeless, the environment.’
‘I need a job.’
He was back in his Confucius pose. ‘You need freedom.’
‘I don’t want freedom.’
‘This isn’t a non-profit organisation. Though I have to say it is rapidly becoming one.’
‘Look, Neil, is this about what I said the other week? About you needing to modernise things? I’ve got some ideas of how to get younger peo-‘
‘No,’ he said, defensively. ‘This place used to just be guitars. String Theory, get it? I diversified. Made this work. It’s just that when times are tough I can’t pay you to put off customers with your face looking like a wet weekend.’
‘What?’
‘I’m afraid, Nora’ – he paused for a moment, about the time it takes to lift an axe into the air – ‘I’m going to have to let you go.’
To Live Is to Suffer
Nine hours before she decided to die, Nora wandered around Bedford aimlessly. The town was a conveyor belt of despair. The pebble-dashed sports centre where her dead dad once watched her swim lengths of the pool, the Mexican restaurant where she’d taken Dan for fajitas, the hospital where her mum had her treatment.
Dan had texted her yesterday.
Nora, I miss your voice. Can we talk? D x
She’d said she was stupidly hectic (big lol). Yet it was impossible to text anything else. Not because she didn’t still feel for him, but because she did. And couldn’t risk hurting him again. She’d ruined his life. My life is chaos, he’d told her, via drunk texts, shortly after the would-be wedding she’d pulled out of two days before.
The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.
You lose your job, then more shit happens.
The wind whispered through the trees.
It began to rain.
She headed towards the shelter of a newsagent’s, with the deep – and, as it happened, correct – sense that things were about to get worse.
….
Note: Above are quotes and excerpts from the book “The Midnight Library by Matt Haig”. If you find it interesting and useful, don’t forget to buy paper books to support the Author and Publisher!
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