ENGROSSING NEW FICTION
THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY ★★★★ Matt Haig
Canongate, £16.99 AT 16, Nora Seed’s life was full of possibility. As her school librarian, Mrs Elm, told her: “You could do anything, live anywhere.” Nora had the potential to be an Olympic swimmer, she was a gifted musician and an academic high-flyer. But somehow, over the years, her life choices have led her to a dead end.
Now, aged 35, she is jobless, dependent on antidepressants, unloving and unloved. Even her elderly neighbour no longer needs her to pick up his prescriptions. When Nora’s cat dies, suicide seems the answer.
But then Nora wakes up in the Midnight Library, a transitional stage like a kind of contemporary purgatory.There, she is forced by the librarian, the same Mrs Elm who showed her kindness 19 years earlier, to face up to the regrets which have paralysed her life.
It’s a painful process from which Nora initially flinches, finding that “the power of all the regrets was becoming agony”.What she quickly learns is that life is full of infinite possibilities but each decision has irreparable consequences.
Nora at first lives the lives she has turned down.
She runs a country pub, living the dream of former fiancé Dan who in this life is her husband.
In another, she is a gold medalwinning Olympic swimmer, which was her father’s vision for her.After retiring from swimming, she works the lucrative lecture circuit, managed by her brother. In the “root life” (as her real life is known), she has been estranged from her brother since she left their rock group.
A third life sees her as a rock star sensation but her brother has died of an overdose. So Nora discovers each life has its disappointments and tragedies, learning “there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness”.
A succession of lives follow faster and faster, as Nora “grew better at using her imagination”. But she also “began to lose any sense of who she was”.
Matt Haig is a successful children’s writer and The Midnight Library, while addressing adult issues, strikes that delicate balance of fantasy and reality which enchants young readers.
At times an uncomfortable read, it is essentially a positive tale about love, second chances and appreciating the life
you have. VANESSA BERRIDGE MORDEW ★★★★ Alex Pheby
Galley Beggar, £14.99
IN this impressively ambitious and vividly imagined novel,
Mordew is a city built on the corpse of God, a place where magic exists and good and evil do battle.
The majority of Mordew’s people live in slums and are exploited by a small class of merchants who in turn are dominated by the dictatorial and mysterious Master of Mordew.
The hero of the story is Nathan Treeves, a child of the slums with magical powers he doesn’t yet understand and whose destiny is wrapped up with the Master’s.
The Master draws magical sustenance from the dead body of God, who was killed by means unknown. In his place exists the “living mud”, a swamp which produces primitive life forms seemingly at random, and in which Mordew’s slum dwellers scratch a miserable existence.
However, the Master is at war with the Mistress of Malarkoi, a seemingly malignant figure based overseas who uses her magic to bombard Mordew with “fire birds” that continuously rain down on the city.
And when the Master reels Nathan into the battle against the Mistress, the consequences are devastating for all. Pheby’s brisk plot is let down in parts by underdrawn secondary characters but Mordew, the first in a trilogy, takes the reader on a memorable journey with unexpectedly cosmic twists.