The Midnight Library. Matt Haig
tion>
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
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
The Penultimate Update Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death
The Only Way to Learn Is to Live
The Last Update That Nora Had Posted Before She Found Herself Between Life and Death