Matt Haig Books in Order: Complete Bibliography & Best Starting Points

The Midnight Library (2020) is the best starting point — Nora Seed, on the night she tries to end her life, finds herself in a library between life and death containing books that represent the lives she could have lived if she had made different choices. A novel about regret, possibility, and why life is worth living, written with warmth and clarity. Reasons to Stay Alive (2015) is Haig's memoir of his breakdown and recovery from depression and anxiety at the age of 24, and is the most direct and personal of his books — recommended for readers who want to understand mental health through lived experience rather than through fiction.

The Midnight Library (2020) follows Nora Seed, a woman in her thirties who has come to believe her life is not worth living. At the moment of her death she finds herself in the Midnight Library — a library containing infinite books, each representing a life she could have lived had she made a different choice. Her librarian, Mrs. Elm, helps her explore these alternative lives: the swimming career she could have had, the marriage she could have had, the different paths not taken. The novel is ultimately an argument for the life one has — for accepting imperfection and finding meaning in what is, rather than regretting what might have been.

Reasons to Stay Alive (2015) is Matt Haig's memoir of his breakdown at the age of 24 — a sudden, catastrophic onset of depression and anxiety that left him unable to leave the house, unable to work, and suicidal for nearly two years. Haig describes both the experience of mental illness (what depression actually feels like from the inside, what anxiety does to thought and perception) and his recovery (the slow, non-linear process of becoming functional again). The book is aimed at people who are suffering or who love someone who is suffering, and its directness and honesty have made it one of the most widely read books about mental health of the past decade.

How to Stop Time (2017) follows Tom Hazard, a man who appears to be forty-one but has actually been alive since the 1590s — he ages at a rate of one year for every fifteen human years, making him effectively immortal. Tom works as a history teacher in contemporary London and must follow the one rule of the Albatross Society (an organisation of people like him): never fall in love. The novel is a meditation on grief, memory, and the cost of outliving everyone you love, told through a series of flashbacks to Tom's earlier lives — Elizabethan England, Jazz Age Paris, the South Pacific.