![]() First edition | |
Author | Matt Haig |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Canongate Books |
Publication date | 13 August 2020 |
ISBN | 978-0-525-55948-1 |
OCLC | 1255441549 |
The Midnight Library is a fantasy novel by Matt Haig, published on 13 August 2020 by Canongate Books. [1] It was abridged and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over ten episodes in December 2020. [2]
The novel follows a 35-year-old British woman unhappy in her dead-end life who is given the opportunity to experience lives she might have had if she had made different choices.
Nora Seed is unhappy with her choices in life as a sixteen-year-old and remains unhappy nineteen years later. Her best friend, Izzy, is in Australia; she has just been fired; her relationship with her brother, Joe, is sour; her music teaching gig is seemingly cancelled; and her cat has just died. Nora feels as if she is useless to the world. During the night, she attempts suicide via overdose, but ends up in a limbo library, known as the Midnight Library, managed by her school librarian, Mrs. Elm. The library is situated between life and death with millions of books filled with stories of her life had she made some different decisions. In this library, with Mrs. Elm's help, she tries to find the life in which she's the most content. [3] However, the only lives she can access are those that are possible, so she cannot find a life where her cat is alive (due to his restrictive cardiomyopathy).
In one possible life, she reunites with her boyfriend, Dan, and finds herself married to him, but it is not the way she expected. Neither of them are happy with their lives, even after accomplishing Dan's dream of owning a pub. She visits a life in which she lives in Australia to be with Izzy. However, Izzy had died in a car crash years earlier. She then tries a potential life in which she becomes an Olympic swimmer. However, she finds it unfulfilling and messes up her TED talk. She sees herself in a world where she is a glaciologist doing research in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic – a very different life from the one she tried to escape, but not necessarily a better choice.
While in Svalbard, she meets another limbo traveler, Hugo Lefevre, who is used to traveling around different lives, and has a brief relationship with him. Her encounter with a polar bear makes her realize she does not really want to die as much as she thought she did. Her next life features her in a successful band, originally formed with Joe. Yet, its glories fade when she finds out he died years ago and that she has broken up with a famous movie star whom she idolized in her root life.
She experiences several other lives with several other people, finally settling on a life where she majors in Philosophy and is married to Ash, a surgeon who bought guitar books from her in her root life, and buried Nora's cat while she was grieving. She also has a daughter named Molly. Through Molly, she learns to love again. This life, by far, seems the best of the lot, but she remains terrified of returning to the Midnight Library. She notices that the boy she tutored in piano, Leo, is now constantly in trouble with the police because there was no piano tutor to help him find something he was passionate about; her neighbor she supplied with medicine does not know her; and she feels completely lost.
She returns to the Midnight Library, despite her resisting, which is collapsing due to her original body dying. Realizing she isn't ready to die, she says a goodbye to Mrs. Elm and finds a book withstanding the destruction. She writes I AM ALIVE inside of it before everything disappears. She wakes up in her original life with a newfound understanding of life, but she is still suffering from the overdose from the night before. She manages to get to the hospital with the help of her neighbor. Her brother comes to visit from London after being notified by the hospital and the two reconcile. She receives a text from Izzy and the two plan a visit together. Nora notices Ash and plans to talk to him sometime, and she resumes her piano lessons with Leo. She finally meets her former librarian in a nursing home and the two play a game of chess.
According to Book Marks , the book received "positive" reviews based on 14 critic reviews with 5 being "rave" and 8 being "positive" and 1 being "mixed". [4] In Books in the Media , a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.10 out of 5) from the site which was based on 5 critic reviews. [5]
The Midnight Library was named a bestseller by The New York Times bestseller, [6] The Boston Globe , [7] and The Washington Post . [8] Good Morning America selected it as a Book Club Pick. [9]
Booklist [10] and BookPage [11] gave the book a starred review. The Book Reporter [12] and The Arts Desk [13] raved about it. The book also received positive reviews from The New York Times , [14] The Guardian, [15] ZYZZYVA, [16] The Scotsman, [17] The Sunday Times, [18] Library Journal, [19] Kirkus Reviews , [6] The Washington Post, [20] Publishers Weekly , [21] and Post Independent. [22] NPR gave a mixed review. [23]
The book was also included in "Best of" lists from The Christian Science Monitor, [24] Amazon, [25] PureWow, [26] She Reads, [27] Lit Hub, St. Louis Public Radio, and The Washington Post. [13]
Year | Award | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|
2020 | Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | Winner | [28] |
Audie Award for Fiction | Nominee | [29] | |
2021 | British Book Award "Fiction book of the year" | Shortlist | [30] |
The Midnight Library was adapted for radio and broadcast in ten episodes on BBC Radio 4 in December 2020. [31] [32]
Nora Roberts is an American author of over 225 romance novels. She writes as J. D. Robb, Jill March, and Sarah Hardesty.
Publishers Weekly (PW) is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews.
Mary Roach is an American author specializing in popular science and humor. She has published seven New York Times bestsellers: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War (2016), and Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (2021).
Beatrice Clare Dunkel was a British author. Earlier in her life she worked as an actress and model under the name Candy Davis and appeared as Miss Belfridge in the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? She went on to write novels as Mo Hayder. She won an Edgar Award in 2012.
Pauline Sara Jo Moyes, known professionally as Jojo Moyes, is an English journalist and, since 2002, an award-winning romance novelist, #1 New York Times best selling author and screenwriter. She is one of only a few authors to have twice won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association and her works have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have sold over 40 million copies worldwide.
Matt Haig is an English author and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction books for children and adults, often in the speculative fiction genre.
Liz Kessler is an English writer of children's books, most notably a series about a half-mermaid named Emily Windsnap.
Twilight is a series of four fantasy romance novels, two companion novels, and one novella written by American author Stephenie Meyer. Released annually from 2005 through 2008, the four novels chart the later teen years of Bella Swan, a girl who moves to Forks, Washington, from Phoenix, Arizona and falls in love with a 104-year-old vampire named Edward Cullen. The series is told primarily from Bella's point of view, with the epilogue of Eclipse and the second part of Breaking Dawn being told from the viewpoint of character Jacob Black, a werewolf. A novella, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, which tells the story of a newborn vampire who appeared in Eclipse, was published on 2010. The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide, a definitive encyclopedic reference with nearly 100 full color illustrations, was released in bookstores in 2011. In 2015, Meyer published a new novel in honor of the 10th anniversary of the book series, Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, with the genders of the original protagonists switched. Midnight Sun, a retelling of the first book, Twilight, from Edward Cullen's point of view, was published in 2020.
The Battle of the Labyrinth is an American fantasy-adventure novel based on Greek mythology written by Rick Riordan. It is the fourth novel in the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. The novel was first published in the United States on 6 May 2008 by Hyperion Books for Children, an imprint of Disney Publishing Worldwide. It has been published in hardcover, audiobook, ebook, and large-print editions. The Battle of the Labyrinth has been translated into 29 languages from its original English.
Wendy Holden, also known as Taylor Holden, is an author, journalist and former war correspondent who has written more than thirty books. She was born in Pinner, North London and now lives in Suffolk, England.
Tessa Dare is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling American historical romance novelist. She has authored fifteen novels and novellas and created five different series. In 2012, she won the Romance Writers of America RITA award for Best Regency Historical Romance for her book A Night to Surrender.
Shawna Yang Ryan is a Taiwanese-American novelist, short story writer and creative writing professor, who has published the novels Water Ghosts (2009) and Green Island (2016) (Knopf). She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Angie Thomas is an American young adult author, best known for writing The Hate U Give (2017). Her second young adult novel, On the Come Up, was released on February 25, 2019.
Tara Westover is an American memoirist, essayist and historian. Her memoir Educated (2018) debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the LA Times Book Prize, PEN America's Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times ranked Educated as one of the 10 Best Books of 2018. Westover was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019.
Jo Baker is a British writer. She is the author of six novels, including Longbourn. She has also written short stories for BBC Radio 4 and reviews for The Guardian and The New York Times Book Review. In 2018, she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Queen's University Belfast, and she is currently an Honorary Fellow at Lancaster University.
Tiffany D. Jackson is an American author and filmmaker. She writes young adult fiction and makes horror films. She is best known for her NAACP Image Award—nominated debut novel Allegedly.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published on 2 March 2021. It is a dystopian science fiction story.
You Will Get Through This Night is a 2021 British non-fiction book by Daniel Howell written in conjunction with Dr. Heather Bolton. Described as a "practical mental health guide", it is Howell's first publication without Phil Lester. It was published on 18 May 2021 by HarperCollins under the HQ and Dey Street Books imprints.
Cathy Rentzenbrink is a British memoirist, the author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Last Act of Love (2015), which was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.