The Midnight Library Read online

  Also by Matt Haig

  The Last Family in England

  The Dead Fathers Club

  The Possession of Mr Cave

  The Radleys

  The Humans

  Humans: An A-Z

  Reasons to Stay Alive

  How to Stop Time

  Notes on a Nervous Planet

  For Children

  The Runaway Troll

  Shadow Forest

  To Be A Cat

  Echo Boy

  A Boy Called Christmas

  The Girl Who Saved Christmas

  Father Christmas and Me

  The Truth Pixie

  The Truth Pixie Goes to School

  First published in Great Britain in 2020

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Matt Haig, 2020

  The right of Matt Haig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Excerpt from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil, copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Used by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from Marriage and Morals, Bertrand Russell

  Copyright © 1929. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 270 6

  Export ISBN 978 1 78689 272 0

  eISBN: 978 1 78689 271 3

  To all the health workers.

  And the care workers.

  Thank you.

  I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

  Sylvia Plath

  ‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’

  Contents

  A Conversation About Rain

  Nineteen Years Later

  The Man at the Door

  String Theory

  To Live Is to Suffer

  Doors

  How to Be a Black Hole

  Antimatter

  00:00:00

  The Librarian

  The Midnight Library

  The Moving Shelves

  The Book of Regrets

  Regret Overload

  Every Life Begins Now

  The Three Horseshoes

  The Penultimate Update Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death

  The Chessboard

  The Only Way to Learn Is to Live

  Fire

  Fish Tank

  The Last Update That Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death

  The Successful Life

  Peppermint Tea

  The Tree That Is Our Life

  System Error

  Svalbard

  Hugo Lefèvre

  Walking in Circles

  A Moment of Extreme Crisis in the Middle of Nowhere

  The Frustration of Not Finding a Library When You Really Need One

  Island

  Permafrost

  One Night in Longyearbyen

  Expectation

  Life and Death and the Quantum Wave Function

  If Something Is Happening to Me, I Want to Be There

  God and Other Librarians

  Fame

  Milky Way

  Wild and Free

  Ryan Bailey

  A Silver Tray of Honey Cakes

  The Podcast of Revelations

  ‘Howl’

  Love and Pain

  Equidistance

  Someone Else’s Dream

  A Gentle Life

  Why Want Another Universe If This One Has Dogs?

  Dinner with Dylan

  Last Chance Saloon

  Buena Vista Vineyard

  The Many Lives of Nora Seed

  Lost in the Library

  A Pearl in the Shell

  The Game

  The Perfect Life

  A Spiritual Quest for a Deeper Connection with the Universe

  Hammersmith

  Tricycle

  No Longer Here

  An Incident With the Police

  A New Way of Seeing

  The Flowers Have Water

  Nowhere to Land

  Don’t You Dare Give Up, Nora Seed!

  Awakening

  The Other Side of Despair

  A Thing I Have Learned

  Living Versus Understanding

  The Volcano

  How It Ends

  A Conversation About Rain

  Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene School in the town of Bedford. She sat at a low table staring at a chess board.

  ‘Nora dear, it’s natural to worry about your future,’ said the librarian, Mrs Elm, her eyes twinkling.

  Mrs Elm made her first move. A knight hopping over the neat row of white pawns. ‘Of course, you’re going to be worried about the exams. But you could be anything you want to be, Nora. Think of all that possibility. It’s exciting.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

  ‘A whole life in front of you.’

  ‘A whole life.’

  ‘You could do anything, live anywhere. Somewhere a bit less cold and wet.’

  Nora pushed a pawn forward two spaces.

  It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction. For instance, when she was a baby her mother had been so worried Nora’s left ear stuck out more than her right that she’d used sticky tape to address the situation, then disguised it beneath a woollen bonnet.

  ‘I hate the cold and wet,’ added Mrs Elm, for emphasis.

  Mrs Elm had short grey hair and a kind and mildly crinkled oval face sitting pale above her turtle-green polo neck. She was quite old. But she was also the person most on Nora’s wavelength in the entire school, and even on days when it wasn’t raining she would spend her afternoon break in the small library.

  ‘Coldness and wetness don’t always go together,’ Nora told her. ‘Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. Technically, it’s a desert.’

  ‘Well, that sounds up your street.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s far enough away.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should be an astronaut. Travel the galaxy.’

  Nora smiled. ‘The rain is even worse on other planets.’

  ‘Worse than Bedfordshire?’

  ‘On Venus it is pure acid.’

  Mrs Elm pulled a paper tissue from her sleeve and delicately blew her nose. ‘See? With a brain like yours you can do anything.’

  A blond boy Nora recognised from a couple of years below her ran past outside the rain-speckled windo
w. Either chasing someone or being chased. Since her brother had left, she’d felt a bit unguarded out there. The library was a little shelter of civilisation.

  ‘Dad thinks I’ve thrown everything away. Now I’ve stopped swimming.’

  ‘Well, far be it from me to say, but there is more to this world than swimming really fast. There are many different possible lives ahead of you. Like I said last week, you could be a glaciologist. I’ve been researching and the—’

  And it was then that the phone rang.

  ‘One minute,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘I’d better get that.’

  A moment later, Nora watched Mrs Elm on the phone. ‘Yes. She’s here now.’ The librarian’s face fell in shock. She turned away from Nora, but her words were audible across the hushed room: ‘Oh no. No. Oh my God. Of course . . .’

  Nineteen Years Later

  The Man at the Door

  Twenty-seven hours before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat on her dilapidated sofa scrolling through other people’s happy lives, waiting for something to happen. And then, out of nowhere, something actually did.

  Someone, for whatever peculiar reason, rang her doorbell.

  She wondered for a moment if she shouldn’t get the door at all. She was, after all, already in her night clothes even though it was only nine p.m. She felt self-conscious about her over-sized ECO WORRIER T-shirt and her tartan pyjama bottoms.

  She put on her slippers, to be slightly more civilised, and discovered that the person at the door was a man, and one she recognised.

  He was tall and gangly and boyish, with a kind face, but his eyes were sharp and bright, like they could see through things.

  It was good to see him, if a little surprising, especially as he was wearing sports gear and he looked hot and sweaty despite the cold, rainy weather. The juxtaposition between them made her feel even more slovenly than she had done five seconds earlier.

  But she’d been feeling lonely. And though she’d studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.

  ‘Ash,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s Ash, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘What are you doing here? It’s good to see you.’

  A few weeks ago she’d been sat playing her electric piano and he’d run down Bancroft Avenue and had seen her in the window here at 33A and given her a little wave. He had once – years ago – asked her out for a coffee. Maybe he was about to do that again.

  ‘It’s good to see you too,’ he said, but his tense forehead didn’t show it.

  When she’d spoken to him in the shop, he’d always sounded breezy, but now his voice contained something heavy. He scratched his brow. Made another sound but didn’t quite manage a full word.

  ‘You running?’ A pointless question. He was clearly out for a run. But he seemed relieved, momentarily, to have something trivial to say.

  ‘Yeah. I’m doing the Bedford Half. It’s this Sunday.’

  ‘Oh right. Great. I was thinking of doing a half-marathon and then I remembered I hate running.’

  This had sounded funnier in her head than it did as actual words being vocalised out of her mouth. She didn’t even hate running. But still, she was perturbed to see the seriousness of his expression. The silence went beyond awkward into something else.

  ‘You told me you had a cat,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Yes. I have a cat.’

  ‘I remembered his name. Voltaire. A ginger tabby?’

  ‘Yeah. I call him Volts. He finds Voltaire a bit pretentious. It turns out he’s not massively into eighteenth-century French philosophy and literature. He’s quite down-to-earth. You know. For a cat.’

  Ash looked down at her slippers.

  ‘I’m afraid I think he’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s lying very still by the side of the road. I saw the name on the collar, I think a car might have hit him. I’m sorry, Nora.’

  She was so scared of her sudden switch in emotions right then that she kept smiling, as if the smile could keep her in the world she had just been in, the one where Volts was alive and where this man she’d sold guitar songbooks to had rung her doorbell for another reason.

  Ash, she remembered, was a surgeon. Not a veterinary one, a general human one. If he said something was dead it was, in all probability, dead.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Nora had a familiar sense of grief. Only the sertraline stopped her crying. ‘Oh God.’

  She stepped out onto the wet cracked paving slabs of Bancroft Avenue, hardly breathing, and saw the poor ginger-furred creature lying on the rain-glossed tarmac beside the kerb. His head grazed the side of the pavement and his legs were back as if in mid-gallop, chasing some imaginary bird.

  ‘Oh Volts. Oh no. Oh God.’

  She knew she should be experiencing pity and despair for her feline friend – and she was – but she had to acknowledge something else. As she stared at Voltaire’s still and peaceful expression – that total absence of pain – there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness.

  Envy.

  String Theory

  Nine and a half hours before she decided to die, Nora arrived late for her afternoon shift at String Theory.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she told Neil, in the scruffy little windowless box of an office. ‘My cat died. Last night. And I had to bury him. Well, someone helped me bury him. But then I was left alone in my flat and I couldn’t sleep and forgot to set the alarm and didn’t wake up till midday and then had to rush.’

  This was all true, and she imagined her appearance – including make-up-free face, loose makeshift ponytail and the same secondhand green corduroy pinafore dress she had worn to work all week, garnished with a general air of tired despair – would back her up.

  Neil looked up from his computer and leaned back in his chair. He joined his hands together and made a steeple of his index fingers, which he placed under his chin, as if he was Confucius contemplating a deep philosophical truth about the universe rather than the boss of a musical equipment shop dealing with a late employee. There was a massive Fleetwood Mac poster on the wall behind him, the top right corner of which had come unstuck and flopped down like a puppy’s ear.

  ‘Listen, Nora, I like you.’

  Neil was harmless. A fifty-something guitar aficionado who liked cracking bad jokes and playing passable old Dylan covers live in the store.

  ‘And I know you’ve got mental-health stuff.’

  ‘Everyone’s got mental-health stuff.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m feeling much better, generally,’ she lied. ‘It’s not clinical. The doctor says it’s situational depression. It’s just that I keep on having new . . . situations. But I haven’t taken a day off sick for it all. Apart from when my mum . . . Yeah. Apart from that.’

  Neil sighed. When he did so he made a whistling sound out of his nose. An ominous B flat. ‘Nora, how long have you worked here?’

  ‘Twelve years and . . .’ – she knew this too well – ‘. . . eleven months and three days. On and off.’

  ‘That’s a long time. I feel like you are made for better things. You’re in your late thirties.’

  ‘I’m thirty-five.’

  ‘You’ve got so much going for you. You teach people piano . . .’

  ‘One person.’

  He brushed a crumb off his sweater.

  ‘Did you picture yourself stuck in your hometown working in a shop? You know, when you were fourteen? What did you picture yourself as?’

  ‘At fourteen? A swimmer.’ She’d been the fastest fourteen-year-old girl in the country at breaststroke and second-fastest at freestyle. She remembered standing on a podium at the National Swimming Championships.

  ‘So, what happened?’

  She gave the short version. ‘It was a lot of pressure.’

  ‘Pressure makes us, though. You st
art off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.’

  She didn’t correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn’t tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

  She smoothed a stray strand of her coal-black hair up towards her ponytail.

  ‘What are you saying, Neil?’

  ‘It’s never too late to pursue a dream.’

  ‘Pretty sure it’s too late to pursue that one.’

  ‘You’re a very well qualified person, Nora. Degree in Philosophy . . .’

  Nora stared down at the small mole on her left hand. That mole had been through everything she’d been through. And it just stayed there, not caring. Just being a mole. ‘Not a massive demand for philosophers in Bedford, if I’m honest, Neil.’

  ‘You went to uni, had a year in London, then came back.’

  ‘I didn’t have much of a choice.’

  Nora didn’t want a conversation about her dead mum. Or even Dan. Because Neil had found Nora’s backing out of a wedding with two days’ notice the most fascinating love story since Kurt and Courtney.

  ‘We all have choices, Nora. There’s such a thing as free will.’

  ‘Well, not if you subscribe to a deterministic view of the universe.’

  ‘But why here?’

  ‘It was either here or the Animal Rescue Centre. This paid better. Plus, you know, music.’

  ‘You were in a band. With your brother.’

  ‘I was. The Labyrinths. We weren’t really going anywhere.’

  ‘Your brother tells a different story.’

  This took Nora by surprise. ‘Joe? How do you—’

  ‘He bought an amp. Marshall DSL40.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘He was in Bedford?’

  ‘Unless it was a hologram. Like Tupac.’

  He was probably visiting Ravi, Nora thought. Ravi was her brother’s best friend. While Joe had given up the guitar and moved to London, for a crap IT job he hated, Ravi had stuck to Bedford. He played in a covers band now, called Slaughterhouse Four, doing pub gigs around town.

  ‘Right. That’s interesting.’

  Nora was pretty certain her brother knew Friday was her day off. The fact prodded her from inside.