Release date: September 29th, 2020
Pages: 288
Genre: Fiction
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?”
A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time.
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 new 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.
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❝This Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibility.❞
I've seen so many people rave about this book that I almost felt compelled to read it. And I was so excited when I started it because so many people posted positive reviews and the idea this book was promising to me sounded really interesting.
Well, I was, unfortunately, kind of disappointed.
Truth be told, I expected something else from this book. I still liked the book because it's different and I loved the whole idea, but I didn't really like how this idea was delivered and I wished the story went in some other way.
The start of the book was promising. It really made me excited and the pages just flew. But then, somewhere around the middle, the story kind of started losing me because it got boring and repetitive. The same thing happened all over again and I lost interest in reading about Nora's different lives because they were boring - Nora was overall a boring person to me. It also felt like she was younger than 35.
I liked how the book presented what it's like to be in the head of a depressed person and I loved the message of the book at the end - that we shouldn't regret our decisions and just because we would make a different decision about something back in the day, it doesn't mean that the result would be different or better.
Although this book was strongly philosophical (the author uses a lot of famous philosopher's sayings), I felt this book didn't give me enough depth (ignoring the philosophical quotes and passages that made me feel like I'm on Pinterest).
The ending felt kind of open and unresolved for me. I just really expected something different from this book and it just didn't give me what I hoped it would. In all honesty, it's not the book that'll stay with me.
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living.
Matt Haig was born in Sheffield, England in1975. He writes books for both adults and children, often blending the worlds of domestic reality and outright fantasy, with a quirky twist. His bestselling novels are translated into 28 languages. The Guardian has described his writing as 'delightfully weird' and the New York Times has called him 'a novelist of great talent' whose writing is 'funny, riveting and heartbreaking'.
His novels for adults are The Last Family in England, narrated by a labrador and optioned for film by Brad Pitt; The Dead Fathers Club (2006), an update of Hamlet featuring an 11-year-old boy; The Possession of Mr Cave (2008), about a man obsessed with his daughter's safety, and The Radleys (2010) which won Channel 4's TV Book Club public vote and was shortlisted for a Galaxy National Book Award (UK). The film rights to all his adult novels have been sold. His next adult novel is The Humans (2013).
His multi-award winning popular first novel for children, Shadow Forest, was published in 2007 and its sequel, The Runaway Troll, in 2009. His most recent children's novel is To Be A Cat (2012).
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