THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY

Seeds of change

RELEASED 13 AUGUST

304 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook

Author Matt Haig

Publisher Canongate Books

The idea that we could be richer, more successful, more loved, happier, better is a powerful one. Somewhere, for example, there’s perhaps a version of this reviewer that gets his copy in on time, and where asking him to restrict himself to 300 words for a book review would be impertinent (Dream on – Ed).

Yet the seductiveness of such visions is potentially destructive, suggests Matt Haig, in his latest slipstream offering. It centres on Nora Seed, a young woman consumed by regret who, at a particularly bleak point, decides to take her own life. Except she doesn’t die, but wakes up in the Midnight Library, a limbo where – in a novel that riffs on the idea of there being a multiverse where all our possible lives play out – Nora is able to access versions of herself and take different paths.

So it is that we meet Nora the Olympic-level swimmer, Nora the country pub landlord’s wife, Nora the philosopher and mother, Nora the glacier scientist and Nora the rock superstar. It’s probably not too much of a spoiler to reveal that ultimately none of these lives satisfies her, primarily because the problem lies within and with the way Nora sees herself.

All sounding a little hokey? Indeed, in the hands of other writers, this could certainly be too saccharine a novel, and there are moments when The Midnight Library flirts with a Hollywoodstyle sentimentality. Yet there’s also grit in the way that everyday tragedies stalk the various existences Nora visits.

The book also pulls off the neat trick of making Nora more likeable as it goes on, by showing her transition from someone who lives vicariously – both through visiting her own timelines and by trying to match other people’s expectations – to someone who might just have enough self-knowledge to escape the limbo of the Midnight Library. Jonathan Wright

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