The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig

‘Who are you?’ But before she had finished the question, she realised she already knew the answer. ‘I’m the librarian,’ the woman said, coyly. ‘That is who.’ Her face was one of kind but stern wisdom. She had the same neat cropped grey hair she’d always had, with a face that looked precisely as it always did in Nora’s mind. For there, right in front of her, was her old school librarian. ‘Mrs Elm.’ Mrs Elm smiled, thinly. ‘Perhaps.’

‘And when does each life end?’ ‘It could be seconds. Or hours. Or it could be days. Months. More. If you have found a life you truly want to live, then you get to live it until you die of old age. If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don’t have to worry. You will stay there as if you have always been there. Because in one universe you have always been there. The book will never be returned, so to speak. It becomes less of a loan and more of a gift.

Volts was dead. So, nothing changed.’ Mrs Elm’s eyes twinkled again. ‘Except you.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, you don’t see yourself as a bad cat owner any more.

Mrs Elm smiled, wryly. ‘It just shows you, doesn’t it?’ ‘Shows me what?’ ‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’

. . Are there any other lives at all or is it just the furnishings that change?’

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

And if I wasn’t religious – which I’m not – I would think that the human brain can’t handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it organises or translates this complexity into something it understands. A librarian in a library. A friendly uncle in a video store. Et cetera.’

she was momentarily distracted by a tattoo on her weirdly hairless forearm, written in beautifully angled calligraphic letters. It was a quote from Henry David Thoreau. All good things are wild and free.

Joe had his issues, obviously. And I didn’t really understand those issues until I knew he was gay, but they say sibling rivalry isn’t about siblings but parents, and I always felt my parents just encouraged his dreams a bit more.’

‘The fun is in the jumping, mon amie.’ ‘But what if it’s in the landing?’ And that was the moment he had returned to his purgatorial video store.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from.