The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

If you were presented with the opportunity to go back in time and change your life, would you? Matt Haig ponders this question in The Midnight Library, a story that follows Nora Seed as she is given a chance to redo her life. Hopeful and thought-provoking, this novel will change your perspective on your own life.

The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon

Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year

"A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."—The Washington Post

The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book.

Don’t miss Matt Haig’s new novel The Life Impossible, coming September 2024

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525559474
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	8,795
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.54(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

An excellent basic book for the criminologist.

Read an Excerpt

Nickell (Detecting Forgery, Univ. of Kentucky, 1996) and Fischer, both nationally recognized forensic scientists, have collaborated on step-by-step descriptions of crime-scene investigation. Each chapter focuses on a specific technique (e.g., handwriting analysis, fingerprinting, autopsies, DNA profiling), and famous cases are used to illustrate how the particular technique helped solve the crime. The authors define investigative terminology in lay reader's language and clear up misused terms. Ballistics, for example, a term often associated with bullets and shell cases on popular TV shows, is actually the science of projectiles; one versed in this field is both a physicist and a mathematician. Academic libraries with strong criminology collections should consider purchase.--Michael Sawyer, Northwestern Regional Lib., Elkin, NC

Reading Group Guide

Warning: this section contains spoilers

1. The Midnight Library is different for each person who enters it. Nora experienced it as a library because of the meaningful relationship she had with Mrs. Elm, her childhood school librarian. Later, we learn that Huge experienced it as a video store, with a cherished uncle instead of a librarian. What do you think your Midnight Library would be? And who would be there?

2. Nora experiences a number of alternate lives in which she achieves a great deal of success in one area of her life at the expense of all the rest, be it in music, swimming, or polar exploration. Do you think it’s possible to reach fame and fortune in a single field and still maintain balance with other areas of your life?

3. In the library, Nora learns that the life she gave her cat was one of the best he could have experienced. Are there any parts of your life that you feel could not be improved by living it differently

4. In her life before she finds herself in the Midnight Library, Nora gave up many of the pursuits that brought her joy because she didn’t feel like she could be the best at them. Do you think it’s understandable that she would have given these things up? Do you think that wanting to be the best at something can inhibit us from enjoying it?

5. Mrs. Elm showed Nora the Book of Regrets when she first entered the library, and Nora was overwhelmed by it when she first looked in. But as she experienced more and more lives, her list of regrets began to shrink. Do you think by considering the ways in which our lives might have turned out differently our regrets truly go away, or do we simply learn to live with them?

6. In the world of the Midnight Library, the books take on the role of portals into alternate realities. Do you think the role books played in the Midnight Library is similar to the role they play in your own life?

7. As the story progresses, Nora finds herself in lives that she could be more satisfied with than others that proved more difficult. Do you think you would be able to live as an alternate version of yourself? Would you want to?

8. Over the course of the book, Nora lives a whole spectrum of lives, some for minutes and some for months, but only at the end does time actually pass, and by the time she wakes up in her root life it is one minute and twenty-seven seconds past midnight and her outlook on life has changed entirely. What do you think this says about the speed at which we decide things about our lives and ourselves? Does it take a lifetime or a just few seconds?

Editorial Reviews

07/27/2020

Haig (How to Stop Time) draws on quantum wave theory in this charming if sometimes laborious account of the many possible lives of a depressed woman. Nora, in her mid-30s and living in the small English town of Bedford, suffers from “situational depression”—though, as she wryly observes, “It’s just that I keep on having new... situations.” After she gets fired from her job and her cat dies, she attempts suicide, only to wake up in a book-lined liminal zone, where she is guided by a librarian: “Between life and death there is a library... Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived.” There, Nora discovers what would have happened had she not abandoned her promising swimming career, called off her engagement, or left the rock band she started with her brother. Each time an alternate life disappoints or doesn’t feel quite right, Nora exits, reappearing in the library to continue browsing for the perfect story. While the formula grows repetitive, the set changes provide novelty, as Haig whisks Nora from Australian beaches to a South American rock concert tour to an Arctic encounter with a polar bear. Haig’s agreeable narrative voice and imagination will reward readers who take this book off the shelf. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Beautifully organized and ingeniously supplemented by real-life criminal case-histories at the end of each chapter, the book provides a detailed—yet simplified—review of the major methods and techniques of forensic science and criminalistics. Anyone and everyone interested in either real crime or crime-fiction or both, will want to read and regularly refer to this comprehensive and informative source by experts in the field.

From the Publisher

This book is well-written and should be of considerable value to those training for a career in these areas.

Library Journal

Extremely well written and easy to read.

Kirkus Reviews