Nora, a 35 year old woman in a dead-end job (in a Bedford music shop called String Theory) with a philosophy degree, takes an overdose when her cat dies, and ends up in limbo - in a library with her old school librarian where each book is a life she could have had, one that she can enter by opening the book. When she's disappointed she can return to the library. One of the books contains her regrets. She uses this to decide which books to try. She finds a life where she marries Dan (instead of calling it off after her mother died). Yes, they bought a country pub but they're broke and he drinks and has had an affair. So instead she tries a life where she and a friend, Izzy, went to Australia (in real life Izzy went alone and is still in touch sometimes). Izzy died, and Nora's on anti-depression pills in a little flat, writing sad poetry. She then seeks a life where she's been a success - she has an OBE having swum at the Olympics and across the Channel. Her brother's her agent. But she's on depressants. She tries being a glacierologist and faces a hungry polar bear. She meets someone like her - a slider who's tried out many lives, but he's not very good in bed, so back to the library she goes. She tries a life where she's a popstar, breaking off with a sexy filmstar because he's not very bright. Fans say that her songs have saved them, but her brother's dead - an overdose - and she's gone through many traumas. Next she helps at a dog rescue place. Next she's married to a surgeon, a child and a dog. She's a Cambridge University lecturer. Her brother's alive. She stays there weeks. It's a happy life. She feels a fraud, the happiness undeserved.
Each time she tries a life, she's dropped into a new situation without any memories from that situation, which makes the initial moments difficult. But the similarities between the lives help her know/predict things. She bluffs her way through, sounding wise by repeating what the librarian told her. Each time she realises that the things she regretted not doing weren't so good after all - so text gradually disappears from her book of regrets - "undoing regrets was like wishes coming true".
After her final return the library collapses. She's left with one book - empty. She recovers from the overdose, her brother apologises for being distance, Izzy plans to return to the UK. And there's a chance of a relationship. It's an ending that was increasingly predictable.
Other reviews
- Natasha Pulley (This is a streamlined novel; no side plots, no broad cast of characters, no twists of fantasy for the sheer joy of it. While the concept does fly high, it also flies straight.)
- Jason Sheehan (Really, it's a therapist simulator, minus the couch. A place of regret and possibility. ... But here's the problem. Haig presents all of this as a straight line. The Midnight Library is unusual in that it follows a plot with no twists, no turns ... And there's a deliberateness to it all. A simplicity to the narrative that has to be taken as a choice on Haig's part ... The only question left hanging over all of it is which one she'll finally choose. And in a multiverse of infinite choice and infinite possibility, I'm just not sure that the answer matters enough.)
- Joyce McMillan (The Midnight Library comes across mainly as a light-touch fictional reworking of Haig’s thinking about how human hearts, minds and souls can recover from a depressive crisis of meaning, which robs life of all its colour and joy, and any sense of its boundless potential. The book is not elegantly written, but the story has an engaging, page-turning quality, and the dialogue is often powerful and pithy, even if Mrs Elm’s library musings sometimes smack too much of homespun philosophy, or a positive thinking manual)
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