Nora Seed has had a bad day, a bad few weeks actually, but thing come to a head when her cat dies, she’s sacked from her job in the music shop, and her one and only piano pupil gives her up. Her estranged brother doesn’t want to know, and her only real friend has moved to Australia and isn’t responding to her messages. She now has no purpose, even the old guy next door is getting his medication delivered so she is no longer needed to pick it up from the pharmacy.
What is the point? There is no reason to go on like this. As midnight approaches, she swallows tablets, washes them down with wine, composes a note.
Instead of death she finds herself in limbo – in the Midnight Library attended by someone who looks like, and is, her old school librarian, Mrs Elms. Mrs Elms explains. Nora has another chance, chances even, at life. The books on the shelves each represent a version of her life in which she made a different decision (yes, we are in parallel universes territory).
Nora chooses a what if moment, opens the book and is transported to the current time in that life where the alternative decision was made. If she likes it, she can stay; if not, she will at some point return to the library. How many goes can she have? More than enough as it turns out as she samples lives lost through taking one path over another.
It is easy reading with playful short cameos of what might have been, though with each iteration, questions of credibility intrude. Haig, as ever, shares his mental health insights and brand of wellbeing philosophy, which for me became a little wearing. The ending, by the time it comes, is rather predictable.
A pleasant enough
read but falling short of expectations raised by his previously enjoyed books -
The Ridleys and The Humans.
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