Books like “The Midnight Library”

What to read after “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Astonishing Color of After
Emily X.R. Pan · 2018
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
After her mother's death, Leigh travels to Taiwan to meet grandparents she has never known, convinced her mother has returned as a red bird. Grief, a family silence and a friendship she left behind come together as she learns what she can and cannot hold on to.
2
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
In a small Tokyo cafe, one seat lets a visitor travel to the past. There are rules: you cannot change the present, you must not leave the seat, and you must return before the coffee goes cold. Four customers sit down, each hoping to say what was left unsaid.
3
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Philosophical”
The Buendía family founds the town of Macondo and repeats its own history across seven generations, through civil wars, doomed loves and strange miracles. A manuscript of prophecies waits all the while to reveal how their story ends.
4
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger · 2003
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Henry has a genetic condition that pulls him through time without warning, so his life with the artist Clare never runs in the usual order. They meet again and again at different ages, and their love must hold through long absences and a future neither of them can change.
5
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Leslye Walton · 2014
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Born with wings she cannot fly, Ava grows up in a Seattle house where the women carry a long history of love that ends badly. As she longs to be an ordinary girl, her family's sorrows keep shaping everyone around her.
6
A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness · 2011
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Thirteen-year-old Conor is visited at night by a monster shaped like a yew tree, who promises to tell him three stories in exchange for a fourth, one Conor must tell himself. Meanwhile his mother is ill, and Conor struggles with grief, anger and guilt.
7
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold · 2002
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon is murdered near her home and watches from her own heaven as her family and her killer's neighbours try to carry on. From that distance she follows her parents' grief, her sister growing up and a small town's slow reckoning with what happened.
8
Life of Pi
Yann Martel · 2001
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Philosophical”
- Magical Realism
- Philosophical
After a shipwreck, a teenage boy shares a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. For months he struggles to survive at sea while holding on to his beliefs and his story. A fable about faith, storytelling and the versions of events we choose to believe.
9
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse · 1927
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Philosophical”
A middle-aged loner who feels half man and half wolf drifts through a city he despises, until a chance encounter leads him to a strange magic theatre. There he confronts the many selves inside him. A novel about alienation, desire and finding one's way back to life.
10
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
Thirteen-year-old Jojo rides in the back of a truck as his mother drives across Mississippi to collect his white father from prison. The journey stirs up family history and two restless ghosts, drawing Jojo toward a harder understanding of his mother and his own name.
11
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho · 1988
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Philosophical”
- Magical Realism
- Philosophical
Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd, dreams of treasure buried near the Egyptian pyramids and sets out across the desert to find it. Along the way strangers, omens and hardship teach him to read the world and to trust his own heart.
12
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V. E. Schwab · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Magical Realism” and “Melancholic”
- Magical Realism
- Melancholic
In 1714 France, Addie LaRue makes a desperate deal to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. For three hundred years she drifts through history unseen, until in a New York bookshop a young man tells her that he remembers her.