Have you ever felt yourself wishing to re-write your regrets? What if you had just made a different decision? What if you had gone down a different path? Walked in a different direction? In Haig’s most recent novel The Midnight Library, Nora Seed gets to do just this when she decides one night that she doesn’t want to live anymore. On that fateful night, she finds herself in between life and death, or as Haig describes it, The Midnight Library.

“‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’”

— The Midnight Library

In this Library, with the help of a familiar friend from her root life, Nora gets to explore endless possibilities of what her life could have been like if she did or did not do XYZ.

I deliberately chose this book to begin the year because the buzz surrounding this book is intense, even winning the Goodreads Choice Awards Best Books of 2020 for Fiction. I have also heard other book reviewers say such amazing things about it and it truly did not disappoint.

This is the second book I've read by Haig, the other being How to Stop Time, and I can without a doubt say that I love this author’s writing style: profound (I highlighted so many incredible lines) yet quippy. I found myself giggling through this book on more than one occasion. He has a delightful way of scattering funny one liners throughout a dark experience.

This book was an incredible exploration of what life would be like if you could rewrite your regrets and live them again. If you could see what your life would have been like if you had met someone else that day, had walked into a different store, chose a different career, studied something different at university or even just chose to live rather than die. I am fascinated by alternate timelines and parallel realties and I really enjoyed watching Nora, a seemingly mundane character no different than you or me, get the opportunity to see what her life had become had she made different choices, big and small.

Knowing what I know about Matt Haig’s past experiences with depression and suicide, this book felt like he was writing his own personal self help book that inadvertently ended up being a life raft for so many.

This book was uplifting and full of hope and was the perfect way to kick off my reading year in 2021!

Book rating: 5 stars

Further recommendations similar to The Midnight Library: If you want more Haig, How to Stop Time was another great read. Drenched in science and not anywhere near as uplifting but an extremely thrilling read, Recursion by Blake Crouch.