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The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library is a fiction novel written by Matt Haig and published in 2020. The novel follows a depressed woman who commits suicide and is given the chance to face her regrets and choose an alternative life for herself. The novel explores themes of regret, consequences of action, philosophy, and parallel lives.

Plot Synopsis
Nora Seed and Mrs Elm play chess in the library at Hazeldene School in Bedford. They discuss Nora’s future prospects until Mrs Elm has to take a call and receives the grave news that Nora’s father has died.

Nineteen years later Nora Seed is thirty-five years old with a philosophy degree and an unfulfilling life. By then, both her parents have died. She works in a music shop called String Theory, suffers from depression that she tries to manage with medication, and lives in a mouldy flat with her cat. One night she answers a knock at her door and Ash informs her that her cat, Voltaire, has died. The next day a series of events seem to deprive Nora of all purpose: she is let go from her job; her estranged brother Joe passes through Bedford without seeing her; her former best friend Izzy doesn’t seem to be replying to her texts; Doreen doesn’t want her to give piano lessons to Leo anymore; her elderly neighbour Mr Banerjee doesn’t need her help fetching his pills anymore; and browsing social media only adds to her despair. At 11:22pm that night she decides it would be a good time to die.

Nora is transported somewhere else. She notices her watch is frozen and doesn’t move past midnight. Through the mist she enters a building and discovers that it is a library. She gets lost amongst the shelves and once she moves to take a book, The Librarian – who appears to be Mrs Elm – intervenes. The Librarian explains that Nora is between life and death, and that while The Midnight Library stands, she is preserved from death. With each book containing a possible life, Nora must now choose how to live, starting from that very point in time. Nora is introduced to her Book of Regrets and she is told to consider what she regrets most.

Nora begins to experience lives she could have lived, and slowly her regrets begin to fade. She chooses the life where she didn’t break up with her ex-fiance and pursued his dream of a country pub, only to find herself in a loveless marriage with him drinking and cheating on her. She chooses the life where she kept her cat indoors, only to find that he had a heart defect and would have died anyway. She chooses the life where she followed Izzy to Australia, only to find Izzy died in a car crash while trying to make it home for Nora’s birthday party. She chooses the life where she didn’t give up competitive swimming, and finds that her father is still alive – but had an affair and left her mother to died from alcohol abuse. She chooses the life where she stayed in her brother’s band and becomes a famous rockstar, only to find after the concert that her brother died of an overdose.

In one of the lives she chooses, she becomes a glaciologist working around Svalbard, Norway. A chance encounter with a polar bear kicks in her survival instinct and for a moment Nora realises she doesn’t want to die. She also meets Hugo, who explains that he is also between life and death, experiencing many different possible lives that he could have lived. He reveals that his version of the library is a video store he used to visit and that his guide is an uncle who died years before. He also reveals that there are more people like them, referring to them as ‘sliders.’

Nora continues to live many different lives until she decides, with The Librarian’s advice, to consider smaller changes. She remembers that Ash, who helped her bury her cat, was a frequent customer at String Theory and once asked her out for coffee. Deciding to try the life where she left Dan and went for coffee with Ash, she wakes up in bed with Ash, and discovers that she’s married to him. She leaves the room to try and discover what her life with him is like, and discovers that she has a four year old daughter, Molly and a dog, Plato. In this life, Nora was a lecturer of philosophy at Cambridge University but stopped to write a book about Henry David Thoreau, her favourite philosopher. She also has a great relationship with her brother, who works as a sound engineer and lives in Hammersmith, London with his husband Ewan.

Nora spends weeks in this life with Ash and Molly and as she continues to live it, memories of the life also come with it – which Nora experiences as déjà vu. She comes to love Molly, Ash, and Plato, and reflects that love was what was missing from her original life. However, she cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong. She returns to Bedford to seek out Mrs Elm (who in a previous life, she discovered is a resident at Oak Leaf Residential Care Home). At the care home she meets Mr Banerjee again, though he doesn’t know her in this life. The care home assistant sadly informs her that Mrs Elm died three weeks before.

As she walks back to the car park she begins to see the consequences of her moving out of Bedford. Mr Banerjee was moved into care, Leo, her piano student, turned to crime and is arrested on the High Street, and String Theory went out of business. With these imperfections, she begins to feel as though she will fade from this otherwise perfect life, and manages to drive back to Cambridge and tell Molly, Ash, and Plato that she loves them before she fades.

Nora is transported back to the library, which is crumbling and breaking apart. The library is part of her and responds to her emotional state. A lightbulb sparks and sets the library aflame, burning the bookshelves and the books around her that contain her possible lives. The Librarian explains that Nora cannot go back, as each life can only be lived once, and that the library is now destroying itself because something decisive has happened – Nora has decided to live. The Librarian instructs her to find a specific book and passes her a pen to write in it. Nora finds it, and realises that this book is her original life. She writes in it and is transported back.

A minute and twenty-seven seconds after she ‘died’, Nora vomits over her bed. She manages to carry herself to Mr Banerjee's house and asks him to call an ambulance. She recovers in the hospital, and reunites with Joe, them both apologising to each other. On the way home, Joe mentions that he’s considering joining a recording studio in Hammersmith as a sound engineer, and that he's met a man called Ewan at the gym. Nora, knowing how this potential life unfolds for Joe, encourages him fervently.

Back at her flat. Nora takes a call from Doreen and arranges to continue Leo’s piano lessons, and then begins to write a tune at her piano. Later, she seeks out Mrs Elm at the Oak Leaf Residential Home and plays chess with her. Mrs Elm mentions that she has many regrets in her life and that she’s lonely, and Nora offers to come see her every day. Nora thanks Mrs Elm for always being kind to her, and then stares at the chess pieces she still has in play, pondering her next move.

Characters

 * Nora Seed, protagonist of the story. A philosophy graduate who works at a music shop assistant. She regrets almost everything about her life, from leaving her brother’s band because of panic attacks, to not exercising enough.
 * Mrs Elm, librarian of Nora’s school. Nora regards her as the person who showed the most kindness to her in her original life.
 * The Librarian, who acts as Nora’s guide in The Midnight Library. The Librarian takes the form of Mrs Elm, and often refers to Nora’s reactions with Mrs Elm, but is ultimately a facet of Nora’s brain attempting to translate the situation in which she is caught.
 * Dan, Nora’s ex-fiance.
 * Ash, surgeon and Nora’s husband in the ‘perfect life.’ In Nora's original life, he is a customer who buys guitar song books from her at String Theory, and once asked her on a coffee date.
 * Izzy, Nora’s best friend who moved to Australia.
 * Joe, works in London at an IT job he hates. Joe is gay and had a strained relationship with his and Nora’s father because of it. Led a band as a teenager called The Labyrinths, which Nora joined and left in her original life.
 * Ravi, Joe’s friend. Drummer of The Labyrinths.
 * Mr Banerjee, Nora’s 84 year old neighbour who refuses to move into a home and maintains a shrine to his deceased wife in his house.
 * Doreen, Leo's mother, and Leo, a teenage boy who Nora gives piano lessons to.
 * Hugo, a ‘slider’ that meets Nora in her Svalbard glaciologist life. He has lived close to 300 lives and expects he will continue to do so forever, as he is too curious to settle.
 * Molly, Nora and Ash’s daughter in the ‘perfect life.’
 * Geoff, Nora and Joe’s father, who used to insist on Nora pursuing a career in competitive swimming. Grew up in poverty with a single mother, and worked as a PE teacher after a ligament injury ruined his potential rugby career and felt like the universe was against him because of it.
 * Donna, Nora and Joe’s mother, daughter of an Italian immigrant and English mother. She worked as a receptionist at a law firm, and then as a communications officer for Bedford council. Though she never discussed it with Nora, it’s implied that she struggled with her mental health and suffered a breakdown.

Reception
Natasha Pulley, writing for the The Guardian, regarded the book highly, saying that "for readers who might be put off by speculative fiction, The Midnight Library is a charming way into the genre."

In her review for The New York Times, Karen Joy Fowler ponders the implications of the multiverse regarding Nora's other lives, and ultimately sums up with "The narrative throughout has a slightly old-fashioned feel, like a bedtime story. It’s an absorbing but comfortable read, imaginative in the details if familiar in its outline. [...] 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."

In his review for NPR, Jason Sheehan was more critical of the concept: “Haig gives Nora (and those of us following along with her) a straightforward path from suicide to closure, from regret to acceptance,” and that “The only question left hanging over all of it is which one she'll finally choose. And in a multiverse of infinite choice and infinite possibility, I'm just not sure that the answer matters enough.”

The Midnight Library won the Goodreads Choice 2020 award for best fiction.

Radio

 * In December 2020, The Midnight Library was adapted for Radio Broadcast on BBC Radio 4.