The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

"We spend so much time wishing our lives were different,
comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves,
when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad"

Title: The Midnight Library

Author: Matt Haig

Pages: 288

First Published: 2020

What is it about: Nora feels alone in the world. She doesn't speak to her brother anymore, well, he doesn't speak to her; her "best friend" has moved to Australia and the relationship is just not the same; she gets fired; her cat dies and she doesn't have a fiancée anymore after she decided not to marry him. 

So she decides to kill herself. No one is going to miss her, right? 

But death doesn't come easily. Before she can move on to an afterlife, she stops into a limbo - The Midnight Library. Mrs Elm, her former librarian at school, is there waiting for her; she will help Nora going through lots of different books, which will lead to different lives of 'what if...'. What if she married the guy? What if she carried on with swimming? What if she was still talking to her brother?

My thoughts: I loved this book. I cried, of course. I knew it was going to end the way it did, but the journey to get there was truly emotional. 

It is such a well written, uplifting novel, perfect for everyone. We all need to remember what's truly important in life. 

We spend so much time on social media, looking at other people's lives, imaging "what if I was her/him", "what if I had all their money/success". And this is unhealthy. We all have different lives, we all are on different journeys and everyone's is as special as the other. 

Even if we don't realise it or think about it every day, our life has an impact on someone else's.