Leant a chance
Sheffield-born Matt Haig takes a music shop worker at rock bottom on a kaleidoscopic journey of hope.
Nora begins her journey through an ever more bewildering kaleidoscope of possible lives, briefly visiting each one.
The idea seems to be to deal first with the major, heavy regrets on which Nora dwells – her sudden decision not to marry her fiancé Dan; the point in her teens when she told her ambitious, demanding father that she no longer wanted to swim competitively; the moment when she walked away from the increasingly successful band she and her brother had started; or the time she decided not to move to Australia with her best friend Izzy. It takes only a brief visit to each of the lives she might have experienced if she had reversed these decisions to show her that no life is perfect, and that regret is essentially a waste of time; and thereafter, the book’s formula of visits to new lives followed by philosophical sessions with Mrs Elm in the library becomes just a shade repetitive, as if the book contained one or two lives too many for its own structural strength.
Haig has close ties with Yorkshire – he was born in Sheffield and has spent most of his adult life in the county. He studied in Hull and Leeds and he and his wife, fellow writer Andrea Semple, lived in York before moving their family down to the south coast five years ago.
He is a hugely popular and prolific writer, the author of 18 novels for children and adults, and of seven works of nonfiction, including his best-selling 2015 book about depression, Reasons to Stay
town where industry is dying or being killed; she insists he must go to university, not work in the local social security office.
The second part is very different and more compelling. There is none of the self-indulgence evident in the first part of the novel. Indeed it is so good that it invites you to reconsider your response to the first part,
whatever that response may have been.
Love and death are art’s two great subjects, the inescapable ones. Both are explored here in a delicate, scrupulous prose.
It’s that rarity: a novel about death that is life-enhancing. You can read it in a long afternoon. It will stay with you and you will want to read it again.