The Midnight Library – Matt Haig

What if, in the moment between life and death, you were given the chance to travel the roads not taken, examining the regrets of your life and seeing where those divergent paths took you?  In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed gets this opportunity after attempting suicide, despondent over the waste she views her life to be.  She tries on many other lives, revisiting the big decisions she’s made in life: stopping swimming competitively, leaving her band on the brink of stardom, abandoning her childhood dream of becoming a scientist.  At the end, she realizes that the only life that gives her contentment is the one she tried to end, and she returns, realizing that she has made a difference in other people’s lives and that she will continue to do so.

I had never heard of Matt Haig or his work prior to last December, when The Midnight Library won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction novel of 2020.  The premise sounded interesting and, thanks to a credit from Amazon, I was able to get it relatively cheaply.  While the story didn’t go quite as I expected and you could see the end coming from a mile away, this was an interesting take on a fairly regular topic.  We’ve all looked back at the big decisions in our life and wondered “what if?”.  But what if it was the smaller decisions that had the greater impact on our happiness?  That’s the interesting question that Nora gets to after trying out the obvious lives and finding that they didn’t give her what she was looking for.