The Midnight Library Explores The Value of Living

The Midnight Library by British novelist Matt Haig with over 2 million copies sold is an international best seller and the top fiction story in the Seattle region according to the Seattle Times. My reading time is usually consumed by non-fiction but because Library is described as speculative fiction and since it deals with quantum science and parallel universes, I was intrigued enough to read it after my wife finished it.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and stop reading this, go get a copy and read it. If you have, you know the story is about a young woman, Norah Seed, who is deeply disappointed with life and decides that the only solution is suicide. In the minute in between life and death she finds herself in the Midnight Library and the librarian is none other than her old school librarian, Mrs Elm, one of the few people in Norah’s life that offered positive help. Now, the librarian guides her to the books in the Midnight Library.

Each book, and there are endless rows of them, represent an alternative life. Mrs Elm helps Norah choose which life she wants to try out and when she decides that life is not for her, she immediately returns to the Library where the process begins again.

The novel treats parallel universes, as in the Many Worlds Interpretation, as an established fact of quantum physics. Of course, it is not. It is one of many highly speculative and likely unprovable interpretations of the strange nature of reality at the subatomic…