The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

    Nora Seed had so much potential. She could have been a rock star, an Olympic gold medalist swimmer, a glaciologist, a philosopher, or married her long-time boyfriend. But she did not walk those paths. But in this life, she still lives in her hometown of Bedford, working at a music store, mostly friendless. And her life seems to only get worse. First, she gets laid off because her boss believes she isn't fulfilling her potential. Then, she gets fired from her job teaching piano because she forgot to show up to a lesson. Then, she runs into an old bandmate, still bitter over the break-up that ensued when Nora began having mental issues. When she finally gets home, she finds that her cat has died. Feeling like a failure, she fires off some final social media posts, a sad call to her estranged brother, who also left her after their band broke up, and decides that her time is done.

    But when she wakes up again, it isn't in some post-humous world. Rather, she is in a vast expanse with a building in it - a library. In it, she meets Mrs. Elm, the former school librarian who nurtured her old dream of being a glaciologist. She tells her that Nora is in the Midnight Library, a library that contains the infinite possibilities Nora's life contained, each one caused by a different choice she could have made. She can choose any life to begin at exactly 12 AM on the day that Nora "died" in her root life. While she is in the library, time does not change, and it will stand until Nora finally dies in her root life. Once Nora chooses a life, she will stay here until she feels regrets and doubt about whether she wants to stay there. If that never happens, then she is permanently transplanted into that life, as if she had always been there.

    During her time in the library, Nora goes through many different lives, some of them reversing big decisions, some of them little ones. She even meets other people who are "sliding" through lives. But she can never seem to settle into one before regret sets in - even ones where her life seems like a dream.

    Eventually, she is on the verge of giving up. She is tired of doing this, feeling like an outsider stealing another person's life. And that, ironically, is the solution. Her root life is the one best suited for her, because it is her life - she "writes" it, so to speak. As the library collapses, Mrs. Elm gives her a blank book so that Nora can begin her own story.

    She returns to the life she had before, exactly the life that she was in the moment she tried to die for the first time, and realizes all the little things she had in her life to be grateful for, that her life has meaning.