The Midnight Library
Between life and death, there is a library — and its shelves are endless. When Nora Seed reaches her lowest point, convinced she has nothing left to offer the world, she finds herself in the Midnight Library, a place suspended at the stroke of midnight where the clocks never move. Each book on its shelves opens onto a different version of the life she might have lived: the marriage she walked away from, the Olympic swimming career her father dreamed for her, the rock band she abandoned, the small choices and the enormous ones.
Guided by Mrs. Elm, the school librarian who was once kind to her, Nora begins to slip between these lives, testing the shape of her regrets against the reality of the paths not taken. Each life teaches her something about the difference between the life she imagined and the one she can actually inhabit.
Matt Haig's international bestseller is a warm, quietly philosophical fable about depression, regret, and the possibility of change. It asks a deceptively simple question — if you could undo every disappointment, would you? — and finds an answer in the ordinary, unglamorous business of being alive.
A thirty-five-year-old woman in Bedford whose life has collapsed into regret; after a suicide attempt she wakes in the Midnight Library and tries on the lives she did not live.
Nora's old school librarian, who appears as the keeper and guide of the Midnight Library.
Nora's older brother, a musician, from whom she is estranged in her root life.
A surgeon from Bedford who tells Nora her cat has died, and who is her husband in one of the lives she tries.
Nora's closest friend, living in Australia, whom she had once planned to emigrate with.
Carey Mulligan narrates the audiobook, released by Penguin Audio alongside the print edition in 2020. The recording runs roughly eight and three-quarter hours and won an AudioFile Earphones Award in 2021.
The novel opens with Nora at her lowest point and turns on a suicide attempt — she takes an overdose, and everything that follows happens in the space between life and death. It also deals directly with depression, the death of a parent, estrangement, and the death of a pet. Matt Haig has written openly about his own experience of depression, and the book is ultimately hopeful, but the early chapters are unflinching.
Yes — it won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction. It was also a Sunday Times number one bestseller in the UK, spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list after being chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club pick, and has sold more than twelve million copies worldwide.
One is in the works. As of May 2026, Florence Pugh is attached to star as Nora Seed and to produce, with Garth Davis directing from a screenplay by Laura Wade and Nick Payne. Studiocanal and Blueprint are producing, with Paramount holding North American distribution. The film was reported to be entering pre-production in autumn 2026, with shooting expected to begin in early 2027. A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation in ten parts was broadcast back in December 2020.