A thought-provoking, heart shattering story of Nora Seed, a 35-year-old woman, who despite all the pain and disappointments she’s had, finds the will to try again — in another life.

One of the best reads I’ve had in the recent years, that makes you think of life itself — and how, despite everything or anything that’s happened in your life, it will always be your life.

TW: Discussions of depression and suicide

Nora has been many things in her life: a sister, a promising swimmer, a bandmate, a partner, a philosophy graduate, a friend, helpful neighbour, a piano teacher, a music shop worker, and a cat owner. Nora  feels like at the age of 35 she’s failed numerous times. As the life she knows starts to crumble down, Nora does the only thing she can think of to end the pain — swallow down a bunch of her antidepressants.

Nora wakes up in a place not quite for the living and not quite for the dead, with only a figment of her former school librarian, Mrs. Elm to guide her through the process: the process of finding a life to try to live  and stay in, instead. 

As Nora begins to explore these parallel lives, she soon begins to recognize how no matter which path in those parallel lives she seems to take, she can’t shake just how unhappy she is in a life that is not hers. She begins to reflect on how the dreams in those lives and her achievements had been created by the hopes and dreams of the people around her instead of herself. 

When Nora finds herself back in the Midnight Library time and time again, she can’t help but feel frustrated of not having found a perfect life for her. That’s when Mrs. Elm instructs her to focus on the “little things”.

It takes a few more lives, more absent dreams and even a few seemingly great lives for Nora to recognise her true will to go on, despite the pain and suffering she’s gone through in her life. It’s only when she returns to the Library for the seemingly final time, as the mere premise of it is crashing down, when she realises life as it is isn’t about the achievements, or the fame, or even the love — it’s about being an endless paths to take and countless of possibilities. The only way you can choose any of them, is the beauty of it all: and the key to do that is to just keep living.

I’m not going to lie, I went into this book with no pre-existing knowledge of it. When I first got to the point of Nora attempting and getting to the Midnight Library, I was a bit sceptical of how it would be pulled off without seeming “cheap” or worse, shallow take on a depressed mind.

As someone who’s suffered from depression for most of their life, and has been going through similar thoughts and feelings to the main character Nora in the book, and more than once have I gone through the cycle of thinking about the point of it all.

Never in my life did I think I’d read a book that would do such a beautiful job at portraying the sheer terror of realising you don’t want to actually die: how you just want to feel the pain and the disappointment anymore.

When I got to the last 80-or-so pages, I found myself crying and not stopping until the final pages. What started out as a whirlwind of emotions, finally settled down to a sense of peace as the premise of the book finally dawned upon me:

Life isn’t free of pain — it’s messy, and it’s painful, at times, but it’s also beautiful, and joy, and endless possibilities. The only way to get to that part is to keep living.

Kudos to Haig for this book. It’s got to be one of the best ones I’ve read in my life.