I cannot recommend it highly enough.Īn addictive, enjoyable and thought-provoking book about philosophy, science, regret, life, love and the true meaning of happiness and success.

It's a truly thought-provoking book, interspersed with much of philosophy's pondering on life and physics' thinking on parallel universes. It is a book that really makes you stop and think about life, about what we are doing with our time and what we really want, deep down. Watching Nora, and every other version of her, live and watching 'root' Nora learn from these is a great read. The language in this book is engaging and easy to digest. The book is written in many short chapters chronicling Nora's journey. Strangers in one world can be spouses in another. The other characters in the book - in all their variations in all of Nora's lives - provide excellent insights into Nora and how minuscule decisions can completely change the nature of our relationships. She is engaging as a character, and watching her move from being set on dying, to learning what she really wants from life makes a very engaging read. Her evolution as a character is fascinating to read and opens up our minds as readers in many important ways. She learns that spending time worrying about the other lives you could've lived is no way to live at all. How so many things she thought she should've done weren't the right choices after all. And yet, as she experiences all the infinite lives in the infinite universes presented to her by the library, she becomes faced with many questions - about what success, happiness, love, and everything really mean to her. She never studied Geology to become the glaciologist she'd always dreamed of being. She broke up a band that could've made it big. She gave up swimming when she could've made it to the Olympics. She is situationally depressed, having never amounted to anything she could've - anything she should've. She lives her life believing it to be a lack of. And so, just after midnight on Tuesday the 18th of April, Nora Seed begins to live every life she could've.

Each infinite shelf is filled with books, each book providing a chance to try another life she could have lived, in a parallel time. But instead of death, she finds the library. So at 23:22, she realises that she isn't made for life and decides to die. She gave up on all the things that would've let her escape the wet, cold town of Bedford and given her life some purposeful direction. Her cat died, she lost her job, her brother won't speak to her, her parents are dead, the boy she teaches piano to no longer cares about piano, she called off her wedding, and old Mr Banerjee next door no longer needs her help. Everything that could've gone wrong in Nora's life has.

And so, 38 minutes after Nora decided to die, she finds herself in the Midnight Library. Between life and death, there is a library.

The midnight library book buy