THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig

You must have wondered what your life would have been like had you done things differently or taken other decisions.

The Midnight Library is a place between life and death that allows Nora (and our imagination) the chance to ‘try on’ other versions of her life that could have happened if circumstances were different.

Faced with an infinite number of alternative realities, Nora is on a quest of self-exploration, finding out how our life is shaped by the people around us, how our actions affect others and deciding what makes life worth living for her. However, for every scenario where she can still imagine a better life, she will find herself back in the library.

Is the grass actually greener on the other side? Is there really a life where we would have had no regrets at all?

This is a heartfelt story based on the “what ifs” we all know so well and its consequences that do so little to help us live the joys we already experience.

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”