Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I took a fantasy trip to Ireland to visit an ancient site that is aligned with the sun on Imbolc — half-way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Tina was also virtually in County Meath last week, with a review of the book When All Is Said by Anne Griffin.

Book: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Viking
Publication date: 2020

Source: Audio e-book borrowed from the library

Content warnings: Grief, depression, death of a pet, suicide, drug and alcohol dependency, and a few other ways that human lives get really messed up.

Summary: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig begins with Nora Seed in a dismal life. She lives in a drab and damp flat. Her relationships are broken. She is in a dead-end job and then, loses that. Things get worse from there until she decides to end it all.

Fortunately, for Nora, there’s a place between life and death. It’s called the Midnight Library and her old school librarian runs the place.

All the books are green. All the books are titled My Life. Each book tells a story about a life that Nora is living based on a different choice that she made in the past. By reading that book, she can step into the life she would have been living if she had pursued a dream for an Olympic gold medal in swimming or the one where she decided to become a glaciologist. There are an infinite number of books.

We get to explore quite a few of Nora’s alternate lives while she learns surprising things about her regrets and a variety of life lessons that she didn’t understand in her root life.

Thoughts: The Midnight Library is A Christmas Carol meets A Wonderful Life meets the world’s greatest life coach.

Years ago, I did an exercise where I listed what I would do if I could live a hundred lives. That was probably prompted by one of the books by Barbara Sher (Wishcraft or Refuse to Choose or It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now), all read long before I started this blog. The Midnight Library is that list re-imagined into a novel.

As you can probably tell from those comparisons, there is a moral to this story — something that is usually more hidden in modern literature. That’s not a deal-breaker for me in a literary work. After all, I claim to draw lessons from Shakespeare.* All the better to learn from a book that is designed for the modern age of the quantum multiverse, social media, and celebrity culture.

I adored the audiobook — thanks to everyone who recommended that version. The reader is British actress Carey Mulligan (Far from the Madding Crowd, Suffragette, Collateral, The Dig, and My Grandparents’ War).

For the Anglophiles, Nora Seed’s root life is in Bedford, about 60 miles north of London. Her various lives take her all around the world, but that includes London and a traditional village pub.

Appeal: I’m trying to decide about the best way to categorize The Midnight Library. I think I’d go with magical realism. I also like a term that’s new to me — Up Lit. This book is nothing like The Christmas Bookshop, but both books were mood boosters, which is the essential point of Up Lit.

Have you read this book? What did you think?

*Romeo and Juliet taught me not to be stupid about love when I was young. Macbeth taught me not to be stupid about ambition when I was an adult. As I age, King Lear teaches me not to be stupid about the burdens that I place on the younger people in my life.

As a cancer survivor myself, I’m sending best wishes to King Charles and, as said in the Palace statement, “for all those around the world who are affected by cancer.”