The Midnight Library is a novel by British author Matt Haig, published in 2020. The book explores the idea of unlived lives through the story of a woman named Nora Seed, who struggles to find meaning in her daily life.
The book follows Nora as she goes through one particularly terrible day. She loses her job, misses a music lesson, and her cat dies. Feeling that she has no connection or purpose left in the world, she decides she no longer wants to live and takes an overdose of antidepressants. However, instead of dying, she wakes up in a library run by Mrs. Elm, a librarian from her elementary school years. It is revealed that this titular "midnight library" allows Nora to experience all of the different lives she might have chosen had she made different decisions. In one she is married to an ex-boyfriend and owns a small pub. In another she is a glaciologist, working in the Arctic. In another, she is a world-famous rock star. She cycles through these different lives, experiencing how small decisions can have an outsized impact. In each of these scenarios, she finds some part of her life slightly unsatisfying and ends up returning to the library. In the end, she decides that she wants to live, feeling that she now sees how easily she can change her circumstances and how full of possibility her life still is.
Acclaimed by critics and commercially successful, The Midnight Library was shortlisted for the 2021 British Book Awards "Fiction Book of the Year" and adapted into a ten-episode radio series for BBC Radio 4.
