And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. “And … and the thing is … the thing is … what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Some of these platitudes would also feel right at home in the Hallmark holiday special movie: “As she switched to freestyle she realised it wasn’t her fault that her parents had never been able to love her the way parents were meant to: without condition.”

Forget the readers figuring it out for themselves - no, the moral and the take-home points will be (didactically) in your face, loud and clear, even if it’s awkward and clunky and stops narration in its tracks. “She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.”Īnd these messages have the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Or embroidered on a pillow - pick your poison. I liked this book until it suddenly decided to moonlight as a self-help manual, replete with messages that would look great and profound on an Instagram post next to a well-posed cup of coffee with those foam pictures on top. 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. Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. 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? 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. 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. Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? A novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever.

The midnight library by matt haig