Recommendations
Books Like The Midnight Library
Between life and death, Nora Seed finds a library where every book is a life she didn't live
Matt Haig's The Midnight Library opens with Nora Seed at 35, who has given up — on her swimming career, her music, her relationships, her brother, her cat, and finally her life. In the space between ending and ended, she finds the Midnight Library: a library where every book is a life she could have lived if she had made different choices. Her librarian from school is there. She can try the Olympic career, the partner she left, the research station in Antarctica. The novel asks what we actually need to be content — and whether the life we have, with its wrong turns, is the one we would choose if we could see it clearly. If the premise, the emotional honesty about mental health, and the optimism about the value of particular lives gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
The Humans
by Matt Haig
Haig's own earlier novel — an alien who has taken human form to carry out a mission discovers, in the process of studying humans, that they are more interesting than the species he replaced. The Humans has The Midnight Library's same warmth and the same argument: that the specific things that make human life difficult (love, death, failure) are also what make it worth living.
- 2Buy
Recursion
by Blake Crouch
A neuroscientist discovers a way to go back to the moment that mattered most — and discovers what that return costs. Recursion is darker and more thriller-paced than The Midnight Library but asks the same central question: what would you actually do with the chance to return to the choice that defined your life?
- 3Buy
One Day in December
by Josie Silver
A woman sees a man through a bus window and is convinced he's the one, and then has to navigate what happens when they actually meet — Silver has Haig's same warmth and the same sense of a love story that is fundamentally about what you choose to value, not what happens to you.
- 4Buy
A Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman
A recently widowed man who has decided to stop living is derailed by his neighbors — Backman has Haig's same understanding that the reason to stay is specific rather than abstract (this neighbor, this cat, this annoying community) and the same gift for writing that optimism without sentimentality.
- 5Buy
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
by Gail Honeyman
A deeply isolated young woman who has arranged her life to require almost no contact with other people begins to be brought back to human relationship — Honeyman has Haig's same understanding of what isolation actually looks like from the inside, and the same warmth about what connection makes possible.
- 6Buy
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North
A man who wakes up at the beginning of his life every time he dies, with all his memories intact — North's novel is the most structurally closest alternate-lives novel to The Midnight Library, but darker: Harry is trapped in a loop and trying to prevent a catastrophe, not trying to find the life he wants.
- 7Buy
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
A man who lives in a world that is strange and narrowed, who has found a life that works for him inside those constraints — Clarke's novel is about discovering that the smaller world you're in has values you couldn't see from outside it, which is the same discovery Nora makes in the Midnight Library.
- 8Buy
The House in the Cerulean Sea
by TJ Klune
A lonely caseworker who discovers that the life he has arranged to be safe and predictable is not the life he needs — Klune has Haig's same warmth and the same sense that the things we need are usually already near us, if we could see them.
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