Matt Haig

The Midnight Library


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      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

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      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