Recommendations
Books Like The Midnight Library
What to read after The Midnight Library
Matt Haig's The Midnight Library is a novel about regret, depression, and the question of what makes life worth living — told through a library between life and death containing all the lives you could have lived. If you loved the hopeful emotional register, the speculative premise used for philosophical exploration, and Nora's journey back to choosing life, these eight books will resonate.
- 1Buy
The Humans
by Matt Haig
An alien who inhabits a dead mathematics professor's body and gradually discovers what is good about being human — same philosophical optimism, same accessible prose, same interest in what makes life worth living from the outside in
- 2Buy
Reasons to Stay Alive
by Matt Haig
Haig's memoir about his own anxiety and depression — the nonfiction companion to The Midnight Library, where the philosophical questions about whether life is worth living are answered from direct personal experience
- 3Buy
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
by Gail Honeyman
A deeply isolated young woman who lives on a rigid routine and has been avoiding something terrible — same emotional journey toward connection and choosing life, same accessible voice and same quality of warmth earned rather than assumed
- 4Buy
A Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman
A recently widowed man who has decided to die is repeatedly interrupted by neighbors who need him — same emotional arc of a person being forced back into the world by connection, same accessible sentimentality that earned rather than cheap
- 5Buy
The House in the Cerulean Sea
by TJ Klune
A case worker for magical creatures who falls in love while protecting children his organization wants to harm — same warmth, same accessible prose, same emotional arc toward connection and chosen family
- 6Buy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
A man whose house is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass and who finds himself travelling the universe — same comic philosophical register, same sense of a person discovering meaning in absurd circumstances
- 7Buy
Before I Fall
by Lauren Oliver
A teenage girl who relives the last day of her life repeatedly — same premise of a person given multiple chances to understand what matters, same journey toward acceptance and what a life is worth
- 8Buy
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
A girl alone in the Carolina marshes who teaches herself everything she needs to survive — same accessible prose and emotional warmth, same story of a person who seems to have nothing discovering what she has and what it's worth
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