The Life Impossible

Described by Matt Haig as his ‘big life-and-love-and-the-universe novel’, The Life Impossible is the newest book by the bestselling author of The Midnight Library. I loved both of these books before I even finished reading them. This one was strange, but just the right level of strange.

Grace Winters is a retired, grief-stricken maths teacher who receives an email from a former student who is feeling like everything is impossible and is hoping for some words of comfort or encouragement. What Grace provides is a story – her story – that is ‘hard to believe’, a story ‘of a person who felt there was no point left in her existence, and then found the greatest purpose she had ever known’.

After unexpectedly being left a run-down house in Ibiza by a long-lost friend who has died in mysterious circumstances, Grace decides to leave a life of ‘eternal guilt and grief and emptiness’ to go and find out what happened to her friend and why Grace, of all people, was left this house. What comes next is an unexpected story full of wonderful twists and turns. Beginning as a story of someone’s grief and loss, it promptly turns into a story of finding community, purpose and self-forgiveness. In between all this is also a fantastical journey of phenomena, extra-terrestrial life, supernatural powers, unscrupulous property developers and proof of the power of people to protect natural beauty. It sounds far-fetched, but it works, and you find yourself believing Grace’s story without hesitation.

It wouldn’t be a Matt Haig book without his signature reflections on what it means to be alive. Via Grace, he delivers pearls of wisdom that lead you to reflect on how you exist in this world. All this is bundled up into a gem of a book that will provide you with a sense of comfort you may not have known you needed.