The Midnight Library
{5/5} “The glacial landscape reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised — almost everything she had bought ad worked for and consumed — had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.”
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, published in 2020
Nora Seed feels that life is so horrible that she wants to end it. She finds herself in the Midnight Library. The librarian, who looks exactly like her old school librarian Mrs. Elm, explains that it is between life and death. And each of the books in the library is a different life that Nora can choose to live. She picks one in which she thinks she will be happy.
It’s about understanding yourself, forgiveness, and all the possibilities in a life.
It’s another astonishing book by Haig infused by, it seems to me, a great knowledge of depression.
One more quotation: “It would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
I’ve read 4 books by Haig. I previously reviewed The Radleys.