I can’t remember when I last wrote a review of a book that is from my book group. Partly, that’s because I haven’t enjoyed a few and I don’t write negative reviews, and partly because life has got the better of me and like last month, not only did I not finish the book, but I didn’t even start it.
Having reviewed Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive here, when I realised our March book group read was his famous The Midnight Library I simply had to read it straight away before time runs away from me again.
The Midnight Library was published by Canongate Books on 13th August 2020 and is available for purchase here.
The Midnight Library
Between life and death there is a library.
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.
Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?
My Review of The Midnight Library
Nora Seed has decided it is time to die.
The Midnight Library is a book that might require some readers willingly to suspend their disbelief, and that might perhaps be triggering for some suffering from poor mental health, but I found it completely engaging, moving and absorbing. In addition, I felt that the narrative could simply be enjoyed as a diverting story without the need to engage with the deeper meanings of the book. The various lives Nora lives are entertaining in their own right and the people she meets along the way are interesting and varied. As The Midnight Library is written in an accessible style it works well as a story for young adults and older readers alike.
However, those more profound elements are what makes The Midnight Library so affecting. It’s filled with the delicate balance between regret and potential, between life and death, and between living for ourselves or living for others – or for what we perceive to be their expectations for us. The range of emotion is so wide that any, and every, reader can find an aspect that resonates with them. Ultimately, having taken both Nora and the reader through the full gamut of emotions from fear to despair, joy to contentment, Matt Haig provides a sense of hope that is authentic and uplifting. Indeed, there are real moments of humour to be found in a story about someone who wants to die which enhance and balance the darker elements.
I loved meeting Nora in all her manifestations in this kind of literary string theory. She really is the personification of a seed of doubt. Through Nora’s experiences Matt Haig is completely convincing in portraying the potential of ‘what if?’ in our lives. In The Midnight Library Nora is given the opportunity to see who, and what, she has the potential to be in other situations. She’s equivocal and flawed and that’s what makes her so fascinating. She’s a real Everywoman.
Whilst I very much enjoyed The Midnight Library as a simple narrative, I appreciated it all the more for its humanity, its helpfulness to, and appreciation of, others in real life feeling like Nora does, and for Matt Haig’s wise and sensitive understanding of who we are as people. I think The Midnight Library might be just the book to save someone in severe difficulty – and what could be better than that?
About Matt Haig
Matt Haig is the internationally bestselling author of the novels The Midnight Library, How to Stop Time, The Humans, The Radleys, children’s novel A Boy Called Christmas, and memoir Reasons to Stay Alive. His The Life Impossible, was published in summer 2024. His work has been translated into over fifty languages.
You can follow Matt on Twitter @matthaig1. Visit his website for further information and find him on Facebook and Instagram.
