This is one of the most unique and uplifting novels that I have ever read.
Imagine a chance to fix every regret that you ever had. To live the life you always wondered about. To try out the opposite of all the decisions you made, right all of your wrongs, and explore all variations of your life in infinite numbers.
At the Midnight Library, you can.
Nora is miserable. She is lost. She is lonely. She feels she has squandered all of her potential, all of her opportunities, lost all of her relationships.
When she loses her job, her elderly neighbor no longer needs Nora to help with his prescriptions and her cat is hit by a car, she is utterly alone and feels totally useless. She needs no one. No one needs her. No one.
She decides she has had enough. She wants to die. So she does.
However, before the process is complete, she finds herself in an infinite library with endless book shelves as far as the eye can see. There she meets the librarian, Mrs. Elm, her old school librarian and one of the few people she remembers being kind to her.
Mrs. Elm explains that the library is a place that holds a book for every possible version of her life. With every choice she ever made, a new book is written. She shows Nora her "Book of Regrets", which is literally sickening and toxic to hold and read. Nora chooses a regret to right and the a book/life in which she made a different decision, a different version of her life without that regret.
We journey with Nora, through countless lives, attempting to correct every regret, trying each on, finding it wanting and returning to the library. She's a rock star in one life. A glaciologist in another, in another a philosopher, a piano teacher. In one life she says yes to a coffee date instead of no and meets the daughter she would have had.
In each version of herself, she discovers incredible knowledge on the meaning of life, love, friendships.
The questions is... will she find the life she wants enough to stay in? A life she really wants to live?
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