MATT HAIG - "Midnight Library" " Nora Seed feels useless. Her cat is dead, her brother doesn’t seem to be interested in her, and she has been fired: nobody needs her. Late one evening, she tries to kill herself. But instead of death, what Nora finds is a library in which each volume represents a version of her life where she made different choices. The possibilities are numberless. There is a Nora who became a rock star, another who has won Olympic medals, another living aboard an Arctic research vessel; some versions are mothers, wives, orphans; famous and influential, or not. All she has to do to step into that life is open the book. If she finds a good life, she can stay; the difficulty lies in deciding “whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday”. The foundation of the idea is the many worlds theory, in which a new universe blossoms from every choice and decision. It’s a beautiful concept, but Matt Haig doesn’t explai...
Readers of her ``Life in the 30s'' column in the New York Times (collected in Living Out Loud ) know Quindlen as an astute observer of family relationships. Her first novel is solid proof that she is equally discerning and skillful as a writer of fiction. To sensitive Maggie Scanlan, the summer when she turns 13 is ``the time when her whole life changed.'' Aware that her father, Tommy, had outraged the wealthy Scanlan clan by marrying the daughter of an Italian cemetery caretaker, Maggie is a bridge between her ``outcast'' mother and her grandfather, whose favorite she is. Domineering, irascible, intolerant John Scanlan looks down on both Pope John XXII and President Kennedy for deviating from traditional Catholic doctrine. His iron hand crushes his wife and grown children, and when he decides that Maggie's parents and their soon-to-be-five offspring should move from their slightly shabby Irish Catholic Bronx suburb to a large house in Westchester which he h...
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