The Midnight Library

Nora Seed, a teenage girl living in the town of Bedford, England, sits in her school library on a rainy day and plays a game of chess with the kindly, middle-aged librarian, Mrs. Elm. The two of them discuss Nora’s past and future. Nora has recently given up competitive swimming, much to her parents’ disappointment, but Mrs. Elm suggests that Nora still has the potential to become anything she wants. Nora doubts herself, but she expresses her desire to escape from her little hometown and live far away someday. This conversation is interrupted by the phone ringing. Mrs. Elm answers it, and her stunned reaction suggests that she’s hearing some very bad news concerning Nora. As it turns out, Nora’s father had just unexpectedly died of a heart attack.

Nineteen years later, Nora is still living in Bedford, plagued by depression, anxiety, and regrets for all the things she has and hasn’t done with her life over the years. To make matters worse, her acquaintance Ash rings her doorbell in the middle of the night to inform her that her cat Voltaire (nicknamed Volts) has died; apparently Volts had been hit by a car. Overwhelmed with grief, Nora regrets not having kept Volts indoors, but she also secretly envies her cat, wishing she could be dead herself. Over the course of the terrible following day, Nora feels like she’s disappointed everyone in her life, including herself. She’s fired from her job at the local music shop, she’s late for giving piano lessons to a boy named Leo (who seems likely to quit learning from her), and she runs into her brother Joe’s friend Ravi, who still blames Nora for leaving their band because of her panic attacks and ruining their careers. Even her elderly neighbor Mr. Banerjee doesn’t need her to deliver his pills from the pharmacy anymore, and Nora feels useless to every person in her life.

Nora thinks back to a few years ago, when she had backed out of her relationship with a man named Dan just two days before their wedding, as her mother had been ill back in Bedford and Nora had felt that her life was spiraling out of control. She regrets ruining Dan’s life as she receives lonely texts from him, and she remembers his dream of opening a pub in the countryside with her—a dream that never came to pass. Desperate for someone to talk to, Nora sends a message to her friend Izzy, who lives in Australia. Their friendship has been weakening ever since Nora decided not to live with Izzy in Australia, for complicated reasons involving Nora’s depression and the fallout of her breakup with Dan. Izzy sees the message but doesn’t reply, and Nora feels completely and hopelessly alone. Back in her flat near midnight, Nora is overwhelmed by despair, regret, and self-loathing. She writes a note and leaves a few messages and social media posts before attempting to take her own life through an overdose.

Nora finds herself in a strange gray void, surrounded by fog and pillars. She approaches a looming building nearby, noticing that both her digital watch and the old-fashioned clock on the front of the building are stuck on midnight. The mysterious building turns out to be a library, filled with seemingly endless shelves of books, all of them varying shades of green. As she begins to pull one off a shelf at random, she’s stopped by Mrs. Elm, Nora’s old school librarian. Looking exactly like Nora remembers her from her school days, Mrs. Elm explains that Nora has entered the Midnight Library, a place between life and death where Nora has the chance to undo her regrets and experience other versions of her life. She shows Nora an entire book full of Nora’s regrets, which proves too painful to read for very long. While Nora insists that she still wants to die, Mrs. Elm tells her that death will come for her when it’s her time. Until then, Nora is allowed to open any book in the library. Each book allows Nora to try a different version of her life where she made different decisions in her past; each one lets her live a life with one fewer regret. Additionally, Nora can try as many lives as she wishes, and if she finds a life that she truly wants, she’ll stay there permanently and gradually forget her old life and the Midnight Library.

Disbelieving, Nora plays along and asks Mrs. Elm for the life where she had stayed with Dan, married him, and helped him realize his dream of opening a pub in the countryside. Mrs. Elm finds the correct book and Nora starts reading before magically finding herself in the life she asked for. But she quickly finds that this life isn’t quite what she had imagined, as Dan turns out to be a rude, drunken husband who belittles Nora, cheats on her, and seems ungrateful for their life together in the pub. Unsatisfied, Nora finds herself back in the Midnight Library, knowing that she’ll fade away from the life she’s trying as soon as she feels unhappy with it. After this, Nora tries many, many more lives by opening more books in the Midnight Library, hoping to find one where she’s satisfied. However, just like in her life with Dan, Nora finds that each alternate life has its own worries and complications. She tries the life where she had kept her cat indoors, but finds him dead from an illness anyway, realizing she hadn’t been responsible for his death after all. She lives a life where she had moved to Australia with Izzy, but discovers that Izzy had died in a car crash a few years ago in that reality. She visits a life where she had made her father proud (and indirectly kept him alive) by never giving up on competitive swimming and becoming an Olympic athlete, but she finds that this successful version of herself is still struggling with depression anyway, and had never visited her mother on her deathbed. Even the life where she’d stayed in Joe and Ravi’s band results in her brother’s death by drug overdose. No matter how happy or successful any of Nora’s lives might seem, it appears that all of them are far from perfect.

In the life where Nora had become a glaciologist doing climate research in the Arctic, Nora meets Hugo Lefèvre, a fellow traveler who’s also switching between different versions of his life. He explains that the library (or the video store, in Hugo’s case) is most likely the human brain’s way of simplifying the enormous complexity of the infinite possibilities being offered by the universe in the space between life and death. He explains that he’s lived many lives and met many other people who slide between lives. Nora disagrees with Hugo’s philosophy of constantly trying new lives and never settling down, but she soon becomes more like Hugo than she’d like to admit. Helped reluctantly by Mrs. Elm, Nora tries countless lives and finds herself ultimately unsatisfied with all of them, even the nicer ones. While she’s slowly making peace with her regrets and strengthening her will to live (especially after a harrowing encounter with a polar bear in the Arctic), Nora begins to lose her sense of self, lost in the endless possibilities of her lives and wondering if there’s a life out there that’s really right for her. Finally, she chooses to try the life where she had gone out for a coffee with Ash and eventually married him. This life seems to be the perfect choice, as her marriage is happy, her career is exciting and lucrative, and her young daughter Molly is a joy. But even this life has its minor issues, and Nora begins to feel like a fraud who’s stolen this great life from Ash, Molly, and even this version of herself. She also discovers that she was more important to the people of Bedford than she thought she was, and it isn’t long before she fades back to the Midnight Library for the last time, feeling sadly and reluctantly unsuitable for this life.

When she returns to the Midnight Library, Nora finds that the building is falling apart and the books are beginning to catch fire. There have been moments when the library was shaken as a result of Nora losing her will to live, but this time the library is threatening to collapse entirely. Time has unfrozen and ticks past midnight, and Mrs. Elm explains that Nora’s original self is on the verge of dying. She points Nora towards one last book that will take her back to her original life. Desperately wanting to live, Nora fights through the flames and rubble to reach the book, writing “I AM ALIVE” in its blank pages. The Midnight Library disappears and Nora finds herself back in her original life, in a body that’s still reeling from her overdose. She recovers in the hospital and appreciates the simple sights and sounds around her, happy and grateful to be alive, imperfections and all. She and her brother Joe make amends and Izzy apologizes for not texting her back earlier, reaffirming their friendship. Nora resumes giving piano lessons to Leo and considers asking Ash out for a coffee, imagining all the possibilities that lay ahead of her in this life—her true life. She visits the real Mrs. Elm in a nursing home and plays chess with her one last time, excited at the idea that no one really knows how the game will end.