The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library begins on a bad day that becomes the worst day of the protagonist's life. Nora Seed is thirty-five, lives in a small English town, Bedford, and wakes up feeling that nothing she does matters. That same day, she loses her job at a music store and finds out that her cat, Voltaire, was hit by a car and died.

With no job, no company and convinced that she has let everyone down, she decides she doesn't want to go on. The book handles this moment with care and without any detail about method, because Matt Haig's interest is not the act, but what exists on the other side of the decision.

If you are going through similar thoughts, get help right now. In the U.S., you can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for free, at any hour. Talking to someone is part of the way forward, just as it is inside the book.

To understand the story, you have to understand Nora. She was a promising swimmer and grew up under the pressure of her father, who trained with her and wanted her to go far. She also played in a band alongside her brother, Joe, but quit the project in a moment of fear. She studied philosophy and dreamed of travel, adventure and a wide-open life.

What was left was the opposite: a dead-end job, a small home, a friendship that cooled off and an engagement called off just before the wedding. Her best friend, Izzy, moved to Australia, and her brother drifted away. Every exit she didn't take became a weight, and her mind started repeating the same question: what if I had done it differently?

It is a recognizable portrait of depression. Nora has no big new drama, she has the sum of small losses, regrets and ruminating thoughts that convince her the future has no room for her.

When Nora is on the verge of leaving, the world changes. She finds herself in an enormous library, with endless shelves, lit by the glow of an eternal midnight. There she meets Mrs Elm, the librarian from her childhood school, one of the few people who were kind to her. Mrs Elm explains that this place exists between life and death.

Each book in the library tells a life that Nora could have lived if one decision had been different. All she has to do is open one to step into that other life, at the very moment she felt regret. If she doesn't like it, she returns to the library and picks another volume.

Haig uses this idea to turn an old philosophical question into an adventure plot: how many lives fit inside one life? The premise recalls the scientific notion of the multiverse, only told as a fable and with no pretense of explaining physics.