“Between life and death there is a library,” she said. “And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived.”
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and those are some lines from Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library. Nora See is thirty five years old and has hit rock bottom in her life. She could have been an Olympic swimmer or a singer/songwriter in a rock band or a glaciologist but, instead she works in a musical instrument store and lives alone with her cat. Well, that is, until her cat dies unexpectedly and she loses her job.
She decides to take enough pills to end her life. Instead of instantly dying, however she finds herself in limbo in an infinite library with Mrs. Elm, her high school librarian. Each book in the library is a different story of her life depending on different choices she could have made. In a version of “It’s A Wonderful Life” on steroids, she has the opportunity to see what her life would have been in some of those different versions. She tries out many, many lives: in one life she is a cat-sitter, in one an aid worker in Botswana, in one she is a travel blogger, in one she ate only toast. In all the lives she dips into she has to pretend to know what is going on until she reaches a level of disappointment in that life and is whisked back to the library. You’ll have to read the book to discover which life she chooses.
If you’ve ever spent time wondering what your life would have been if you’d followed a different path,then you must read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
