The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Synopsis:

This is a fantasy fiction book about Nora Seed, a thirty-five year old woman who is restless and unsatisfied with her life and with the help of Mrs. Elm, the school librarian, discovers the Midnight Library and travels throughout the library to experience different lives and find her purpose in life.

She first experiences being married to Dan and owning a pub, next she travels to Australia where she had dreamed of living with her friend, Izzy, of being a glaciologist, and of being a singer in a band. Nora also dreams of working at an animal shelter and finally of being married to Ash, being a professor of philosophy, and having a daughter, Molly.

She meets Hugo, another person traveling through different lives and has a brief relationship with him. Finally, she goes back to her current life and learns to be content and satisfied.

Review:

I loved this book and love the concept of being able to experience different lives, and I thought the main theme of this book was to appreciate the life that you are currently living. Until Nora had experienced all the different lives, she was not fully able to appreciate her current life.

“Between life and death there is a library. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices. Would you have done anything different if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”

“Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is made over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to the lives you could be living.”

“Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living.”

“And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really was the absence of love.”