A friend recommended this book to me. The author is Matt Haig and I would classify it as almost science-fiction or fantasy.
We start our story with a miserable heroine who has failed at almost literally everything she has attempted. At the beginning of the book, she loses her dead-end job at a not-very-thriving music shop and finds her cat dead at the side of the road. She decides to end it all and takes a bunch of pills to make sure it happens.
Then, she “comes to” at the front of a tall, stone building, which she finds after going inside is a library. Not one she has ever seen before, though. This is an infinite library with shelves that go on forever, a ceiling that stretches far above the shelves, and books in every shade of green. And there is a librarian. This she does recognize. It’s Mrs. Elm, from her elementary school, a woman who’d played an important role in our young heroine’s life.
Mrs. Elm tells Nora that each book on the shelf is another life she herself might have lived if she had made different choices along the way. But first, Nora must read The Book of Regrets, which lists all the things that led Nora to try to end her own life.
I enjoyed this novel. Each of the new lives Nora experiences as she browses through the library is vivid, logical, and interesting. She becomes a famous scientist, a rock star, an Olympic swimmer, and a housewife. In each life, her friends and family are slightly different. In the end, she is a wiser woman who realizes that some of her goals were chosen for the wrong reasons. However, she finds she has a deadline–back in the real world, between the hour of 11:59 and midnight, her life is at stake.
If you like a quirky, feel-good book, you should pick this one up.
