The Midnight Library- Matt Haig First Day Reading

Just started reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig—a book my girlfriend practically worships. She’s recommended it a thousand times, so I finally caved and decided to give it a go.

The book opens with teenage Nora playing chess in a school library with a wise, all-knowing librarian—the kind who seems to hold the secrets of the universe in her hands. As they play, they discuss the infinite, mind-blowing possibilities awaiting Nora in the future. And then, like a bolt of lightning on a sunny day, disaster strikes. A phone call. A piece of news so terrible that the pages practically tremble under its weight. Though the book doesn’t reveal it immediately, we later learn that she lost her mother that very day.

Fast forward nineteen years, and Nora’s life is a hurricane of chaos. She’s in her mid-thirties, and everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong—almost as if the universe had a personal vendetta against her. Her dreams? Shattered into a million irreparable pieces. She gave up swimming, her philosophy degree is as useful as a chocolate teapot, she left a music band that was this close to success, and, oh, she canceled her wedding just two days before walking down the aisle. If that wasn’t enough, fate piled on misery after misery—her cat, Volt, met an untimely end, she lost her job at the music store, her only piano student was taken away, and even her elderly neighbour decided she was no longer needed.

At this point, loneliness wraps around Nora like an inescapable fog. Even the grand ideas of existentialism—offering philosophical justifications for human solitude—fail to comfort her. So, in what feels like the final crescendo of her symphony of despair, she sends her brother a last message, pens a farewell letter to the void, and then… well, the chapter ends. Did she take her own life? Did something intervene? I don’t know yet, but I’ll be flipping pages faster than ever to find out.