Matt Haig

The New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year "A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."—The Washington Post The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book. 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.

A Novel

The Midnight Library

Nora's life has been going from bad to worse. Then at the stroke of midnight on her last day on earth she finds herself transported to a library. There she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived. Which raises the ultimate question: with infinite choices, what is the best way to live?

Julia Rutgers

Her mind felt different here. She thought a lot in this life, but her thoughts were gentle.

THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A BBC TWO BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK 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?

Simply just right. You can’t start it without without feeling the extreme need to know the end 

Simon Enz

There she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out cach of the other lives she might have lived.

'Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try [ . . . ]'

I am a waste of a carbon footprint, to be honest.

Kyler Phillips

The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life.

You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.

We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

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.

In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life.

In chess after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing.

That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’. And here she was, in the privileged position of being able to sample these many alternatives.

Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living. And if she was to find a life truly worth living, she realised she would have to cast a wider net.

It would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness

We spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all.

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.

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything.

(Bre)anne✨

The touching, funny and heartwarming new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of How to Stop Time and Reasons to Stay Alive.

chiara

She realised that she hadn't tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.

No, cause imagine facing a polar bear hasn’t stopped someone from wanting to live this life, but sex with you has. 🤡🤡 

She felt like she might not have been there at all. 

But the sex turned out to be a disappointment. A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it. 

I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

You are only limited by your imagination.

Cecilie Spangsberg

Hannah Yang

I wanted to love The Midnight Library because its premise -- heartwarming, philosophical, libraries -- is so up my alley. And while I didn't dislike this book, it was not quite what I expected, and if someone were truly in Nora's initial mental state, I'm not sure how helpful this (self help) book would be. 

The reader follows Nora through her many possible lives and in her many lives she realizes that her regrets were not necessary, that she should pursue her own dreams, that her original seemingly failed life still had positive impacts on other people (very It's a Wonderful Life), that she could repair her relationships with people she cared about, that she had unlimited potential, etc. 

While these are all good lessons, they are not delivered subtly. The book becomes extremely predictable and while I appreciate the sentiments of the ending, it is undeniably cheesy as it wraps up about every loose end in Nora's once-seemingly-miserable life. (This makes it sound like I am against happy endings. I promise I am not and I do think the book's hopefulness is lovely; it is just truly a collection of life-is-worth-living cliches packaged in alternate lives that are difficult to care about when it is clear which life will be chosen in the end.)

It is hard to critique The Midnight Library because all of the things that Nora realizes are positive, but as a story / novel it just isn't that compelling? Even the book itself acknowledges this at the point where Nora is "lost in lostness": I can't get to know or like Nora's character because she is always changing and does not even know who she is, I can't feel for the constant characters in her lives because they are different in each of her lives as well. This may work well for the book's self help aspect (Nora is a great self-insert character) but if you didn't pick up this book for self help, you won't get much of a story. The prose itself is also not exceptionally beautiful or smart, so The Midnight Library's main offering really is its deluge of life lessons.

Anyways, it is a quick read and maybe it can re-inject a zest for life in some readers -- but I can gratefully say that I do not need The Midnight Library.

A simple book, inspirational at certain places but I guess this wasn’t for me, at this time. 

I felt happy for Nora in the end. That sure was a feeling of joy, but the reading experience has been tiring and dull for most of the time. 

Vandita UN

A simple book, inspirational at certain places but I guess this wasn’t for me, at this time. 

I felt happy for Nora in the end. That sure was a feeling of joy, but the reading experience has been tiring and dull for most of the time. 

A little too pop-sci/aggressively hopeful for my taste, though effective at times. The descriptions of the main character’s suicidal depression read to me as written by someone who’s never actually experienced it themselves. I’m not about to slap a “problematic” label on this, but I imagine if I had read this in the depths of depression, I may have hated it. 

Luckily though, in my quite healthy current state, I found it charming, if a bit simplistic and predictable. I had to push through some quibbles in the fantasy mechanics for the first half or so, but it was worth it to go along for the ride. 

If you’re familiar with depression, you already know a book isn’t going to save your life. But it’s worth a read if you want some momentary shift in perspective, or a gentle reminder that there’s a lot of potential out there in the world, and inside us all. 

Michael Klepacki

A little too pop-sci/aggressively hopeful for my taste, though effective at times. The descriptions of the main character’s suicidal depression read to me as written by someone who’s never actually experienced it themselves. I’m not about to slap a “problematic” label on this, but I imagine if I had read this in the depths of depression, I may have hated it. 

Luckily though, in my quite healthy current state, I found it charming, if a bit simplistic and predictable. I had to push through some quibbles in the fantasy mechanics for the first half or so, but it was worth it to go along for the ride. 

If you’re familiar with depression, you already know a book isn’t going to save your life. But it’s worth a read if you want some momentary shift in perspective, or a gentle reminder that there’s a lot of potential out there in the world, and inside us all. 

'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.

Jenna

I really enjoyed basking in the beautiful writing of this book and overall, found this to be a pleasant and easy read. I took comfort in the library/book theme and enjoyed how my opinion of the cast of characters changed throughout the story. I really connected with how Nora feels compelled to take on the dreams of others, instead of pursuing her own. I will also forever struggle with the concept of brain-grey, the color of The Midnight Library. 

I also think this story had a very romanticized take on depression and suicide. Parts of it truly resonated with my own experiences and parts left me feeling like I was watching the Hallmark version of my traumas. 

For anyone who is interested in reading this, I will say this book has been overhyped, but is still a rather lovely read that is 50% fiction/30% self-help/20% philosophy references.

I’ve heard lots of negative things about this book so I went into it a bit skeptical but it was great! I really enjoyed it and once you get into it it’s an easy read

Pia 

Trite and excessively sentimental. Preachy to a concerning degree at the end. 

Jenny Smoothy

Lara Engle

This was kind of like It's a Wonderful Life for the modern age. I thought Nora was a sympathetic character. Some of her realizations may have seemed somewhat obvious, but it was still satisfying to experience them with her.

Barbara Williford

“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. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’”

Nora is stuck. She is stuck in depression, stuck in a dead end job, stuck being broke, broken relationships. The death of her cat sends her over the edge hovering between life and death having to make some tough choices. It takes facing her regrets, opening her eyes to see that everything we perceive is from our own personal perspective and may not be reality.

Excellent writing and deep insight. A book you won’t want to put down.

i heard bad thing but i loved how it showed that you could always do thing different 

Ilse van Seeters

Started out so depressing. I was depressed FOR Nora. But nearing the end, her view on life changed. And I could feel the joy she felt. It was actually a beautiful story. I think I would read it again. 

Caroline Rutledge 

James Tucker

An enjoyable story with several quotes that especially stood out to me.

"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."

"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."

The Midnight Library is a place between life and death, a place where you can discover the other lives you might have lived, all whilst trying to come to terms and accept the one you're currently living.

From a place of understanding and knowledge comes not acceptance but contentedness with oneself — that every day we can choose to just be and not escape reality or feel we're missing out on something.

You could read this book again and again and take something different away from it every time. The author delicately intertwines both fiction, history and modest philosophical self-help through its characters. A must-read for anyone that wants to walk through their own library at midnight.

The Midnight Library is a place between life and death, a place where you can discover the other lives you might have lived, all whilst trying to come to terms and accept the one you're currently living.

From a place of understanding and knowledge comes not acceptance but contentedness with oneself — that every day we can choose to just be and not escape reality or feel we're missing out on something.

You could read this book again and again and take something different away from it every time. The author delicately intertwines both fiction, history and modest philosophical self-help through its characters. A must-read for anyone that wants to walk through their own library at midnight.

I'm SOBBING. Happy I went back and finished this one! However, please please please read the trigger warnings before reading this. Oftentimes I read books that are kind of ~philosophical~ (looking at you The Alchemist), and I end up hating them because they often feel too preach-y. I really, really liked this one because it shows you the lessons (instead of telling you about them) and you learn alongside Nora. Highly, highly recommend. I know people either love or hate this book -- wonder why?

TW to be added later

I'm SOBBING. Happy I went back and finished this one! However, please please please read the trigger warnings before reading this. Oftentimes I read books that are kind of ~philosophical~ (looking at you The Alchemist), and I end up hating them because they often feel too preach-y. I really, really liked this one because it shows you the lessons (instead of telling you about them) and you learn alongside Nora. Highly, highly recommend. I know people either love or hate this book -- wonder why?

iachille

I loved this story and what it is meant to represent. As someone who has struggled with mental health and suicidal ideation for most of my life, this resonated so much with me. I love the storyline and even though it was a bit predictable in how the book ends, it was predictably that was welcome and not insufferable 

Jenna Thornton

"Good morning America book club"--Jacket.

Overall I enjoyed the book, it was easy to read and did get to me, though somehow it put me in a reading slump, maybe because it seemed very slow from time to time when it could have been faster.  It will definitely keep me thinking about life.

Melinda 

Honestly, I randomly picked it up without thinking that this type of story might be for me. 

Well thankfully I was wrong. I think it worked so well for me because I could relate to Nora so very much. 

And the farther you go into the story the more you learn alongside Nora. It is very comforting to read the kind of book knowing that everyone can go through that thinking process. 

And, finally the comfort when you finish this book. In StoryGraph you could see it qualified ad hopeful and it is hopeful. One of the most satisfying ending I’ve ever read I think.

Amira BEN

Honestly, I randomly picked it up without thinking that this type of story might be for me. 

Well thankfully I was wrong. I think it worked so well for me because I could relate to Nora so very much. 

And the farther you go into the story the more you learn alongside Nora. It is very comforting to read the kind of book knowing that everyone can go through that thinking process. 

And, finally the comfort when you finish this book. In StoryGraph you could see it qualified ad hopeful and it is hopeful. One of the most satisfying ending I’ve ever read I think.

Rohit Arondekar

The author tackles difficult subjects with grace and a certain frankness that isn't too sharp nor too dull. I thought the writing was very good but around the half way mark lost interest as the end was starting to become obvious. This isn't to say the book isn't worth reading, but maybe I've gotten used to media that involves a lot of twists and turns making this a rather straight forward read. I'm still glad I read the book.

The engine driving this book is universal: “What if?” To see it play out to the full imaginative extent is to have a potent anti-venom for regret.  I appreciate the subtler message, too, at the end—that your choices have consequences not just for you but for every person around you. That a good root life is one where you choose to be kind.

Jack Cheng

Joy Bush

This book started off wonderfully, as someone with depression I was instantly hooked. 
But then I realized 2 things... 1. This trope of living a lot of different lives/parallel universes, the butterfly effect, etc has been done tons of times. 2. That the the self help platitudes are stuff I've already been told and they don't help. Although what does that say about me, hoping a fiction book would fix my depression? lol 
But even so it was still a really enjoyable read, I recommend the audiobook version too!

Ok I picked up this book with entirely different expectations but was positively surprised by the story. A bit depressing at times, this novel still gave such a great insight on life, it’s decisions, and regrets. Loved it and think it should be read in school so that more can be inspired.

Lenja

Der Schreibstil ist ausbaufähig, aber ich kann nicht leugnen, dass ich es sehr genossen habe. Von Matt Haig habe ich bereits reasons to stay alive gelesen und dieses Buch ist so anders und doch recht ähnlich. Ich habe mich mit Nora Seed teilweise erstaunlich gut identifizieren können. Ihre Interessen sind meiner ziemlich ähnlich und auch das quälende Bedürfnis all die möglichen Leben zu erleben und doch die eigene Existenz zu hassen, kommt mir bekannt vor. Das Ende hat mich tatsächlich nicht besonders überrascht, aber trotzdem zeigt es eine angenehme Message auf. Die Frau, die sterben wollte, wollte am Ende doch ihr eigenes Leben leben und es ist schön diese Entwicklung von ihr zu beobachten. Irgendwie auch eine nette Vorstellung, dass die möglichen Leben Bücher sind, die man sich durchlesen kann. Die Side-Story mit Hugo hätte es meiner Meinung nach nicht unbedingt gebraucht, aber ich liebe es, wenn Liebesgeschichten in Büchern nicht für immer sind. Dass Nora am Ende zufrieden mit ihrem Leben ist, ist vielleicht auch ein wenig unrealistisch - gut möglich, dass es nicht das letzte Mal gewesen ist, dass sie sich in einem solchen Loch wiederfinden, aber ich wünsche ihr das Beste. Mir gefallen die Referenzen zu Schrödingers Katze und der Vielen-Welten-Theorie. Physik kann so faszinierend sein. Alles in allem hat es mir gefallen. Es war an der ein oder anderen Stelle schmerzhaft, aber ich konnte mir schon denken, dass es ein gutes Ende nehmen wird. Matt Haig ist nicht der Mann, der einem am Ende erzählt, dass das Leben unsinnig und nicht lebenswert ist. Wir alle sitzen doch in dem gleichen Boot, indem wir uns selbst an die Hoffnung klammern, die wir anderen vermitteln. Die Idee der Story ist sehr gut, ein wenig hapert es an der Umsetzung, aber weil es mir ein so bestätigendes Gefühl gegeben hat, bin ich sehr begeistert.

Jack O‘Conner

A lil preachy, but a message that got me at the right time.

The Midnight Library A Novel

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