Nora Seed wants to die. She doesn't feel like her mediocre life is worth living anymore after her cat dies, she loses her job, and she doesn't have a clear way to achieve any of her dreams. Late on that fateful Tuesday night, Nora takes too many pills and finds herself in the Midnight Library.
In the midnight library it is always midnight: it is a place between life and death, a sort of Schrodinger's Cat in the plurality of worlds where the Librarian helps Nora chose a book--a life--to try out while she's in between. Nora begins with lives where she made the other choice: stayed with swimming and became an Olympic champion; continued on to study glaciers and join a research team in the Arctic; stayed with her ex, got married, and lived out his dream of owning a pub; or joined her best friend on an adventure in Australia.
Each life shows her a new way she could have lived, but there's always a sense of displacement - as if she's joined the race partway through. When she becomes disappointed in her life Nora returns to the Midnight Library and the Librarian. With each new life comes the possibility of perfection, but each life is shown to have it's own disappointments. When Nora experiences motherhood in one of her lives she discovers she does want to live.
But is the desire to live enough to keep her alive? Haig's thought experiment about what happens after death is a poignant look into regret, despair, and hope. With suicide at the center of the tale this story is appropriate for adults and mature readers.
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