The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.

A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.

‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’

The art of swimming – she supposed like any art – was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.

Mrs Elm smiled, wryly. ‘It just shows you, doesn’t it?’ ‘Shows me what?’ ‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes.

‘The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.’

Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.

And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’

Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.

And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.

It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.

‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’