Picture your life flashing before your eyes, but slowly, on a steam engine, with a brisk Edwardian ghost in a cloche hat for company. That is roughly the conceit of The Midnight Train by Matt Haig, the second instalment in his Midnight World and the sort-of-but-not-really sequel to The Midnight Library. If the first novel asked what your life might have looked like in every other version of itself, this one asks a quieter, harder question. What if you could only watch the version you actually chose?
A Companion to The Midnight Library, Not a Carbon Copy
For readers tracking the series, here is the lay of the land.
- Book 1: The Midnight Library (2020). A library between life and death.
- Book 2: The Midnight Train (2026). A train through life after death.
Haig is clear in his acknowledgements that this is not a traditional sequel. It is a conceptual sibling. The same philosophical engine drives it, but the tracks run somewhere new. Where Nora Seed got to flick through infinite lives, Wilbur Budd, the bookseller at the heart of this novel, has to sit with the one he already had. And in a small, lovely touch, Nora herself makes a cameo near the end. Fans of the first book will recognise the wink without feeling clobbered by it.
The Premise, Spoiler-Free
Wilbur Budd dies in 2026. He is eighty-one, wealthy, alone in a vast Bedfordshire house, taking weekly piano lessons because his doctor told him to learn something new. The opening pages set the death up with the same quiet, observant warmth that runs through everything Haig writes.
Then the Midnight Train arrives. His guide is Mrs Agnes Bagdale, the once-owner of the Sheffield bookshop he loved as a child. She is funny, strict, and fond of the phrase Old Bean. The train carries Wilbur backward through his life, stopping at the moments that made him and the moments he later wished he could redo. Most of all, it stops at Maggie, the woman he married in Venice in 1974, and the version of himself he gave away over the years that followed.
That is as much as you need to know. The pleasures of The Midnight Train by Matt Haig lie in the slow accumulation of small decisions, not in any single twist.
Characters Worth Caring About
Haig has always been good at people who feel like they live somewhere real, and that holds true here.
- Wilbur. Thoughtful, anxious, ambitious to a fault. The kind of man who confuses success with safety.
- Maggie. Warm as June, tough as Sheffield steel, the moral centre of the book without ever being a saint.
- Dougie, Wilbur’s older brother, written with such tenderness that he lingers in the reader’s chest long after his scenes end.
- Agnes Bagdale. The breakout figure of the novel, more memorable than some leading characters in literary fiction this year.
- Charlie Applewood, the bullied schoolfriend turned lifelong best mate. His side story alone is worth the ticket.
Where the Book Really Sings
There is a reason this novel will land on so many bedside tables this year. Haig writes in a voice that is gentle without being soft. His sentences are short. His ideas are big. The whole book reads like a long, kind conversation with someone who has stopped pretending to know everything.
A few things he gets very right:
- Sheffield as a living place, not a backdrop. The dialect, the buses, the chimneys coming down brick by brick. It is a love letter to a city he clearly knows.
- Bookshops as soul-mirrors. Agnes’s idea that books are mirrors for the soul runs through every page. As a piece of book-about-books, this is a treasure for anyone who has ever loved a shop with creaky floorboards.
- The honeymoon framing. Setting the opening and closing in Venice in 1974 gives the novel a circular shape that pays off beautifully.
- The small philosophy. Lines like not every stop is a crash and time turns houses into museums and lovers into strangers stay with you.
Where It Pulls a Little Off the Rails
A balanced review of The Midnight Train by Matt Haig has to admit that this is not a flawless novel. Some of the weaker moments come from the very thing his fans love.
- The philosophical takeaways are sometimes underlined twice. A braver edit would have trusted the reader to feel things on their own.
- The structure echoes The Midnight Library closely. Witness a life, learn a lesson, glimpse the alternative. Readers hoping for a fresh formal experiment may find the familiarity dampening.
- Wilbur as a protagonist is mostly passive. He watches more than he chooses, which is the point, but it occasionally drains the dramatic engine.
- A handful of supporting figures stay sketchy. The mother, Edith, deserved more pages than she got.
None of this sinks the novel. It simply explains why this is a much-loved book rather than a perfect one.
The Writing Style
The Midnight Train by Matt Haig leans hard into the voice that made him a household name. Short chapters, often just one or two pages, carry titles like It Goes By So Fast and Why Sunsets Are Beautiful. The effect is hypnotic. You keep saying one more chapter and finishing the book in two sittings.
He borrows openly from his influences. Patricia Highsmith and Raymond Chandler hover around the bookshop scenes. John Steinbeck is quoted by the train’s ghost. Kierkegaard gets a nod. None of this feels showy. It feels like a writer surrounded by the books that raised him, sharing them with you.
Matt Haig’s Wider Bookshelf
If you are new to him, this novel is a fine first step. If you already know him, you will find quiet echoes of his earlier work running through it.
Worth reading alongside:
- The Midnight Library (2020). The obvious starting point.
- How to Stop Time (2017). Another book about time, ageing, and love.
- The Humans (2013). A stranger, funnier outing in the same emotional register.
- The Life Impossible (2024). His most recent novel before this one.
- Reasons to Stay Alive (2015) and The Comfort Book (2021). His non-fiction, which sits behind every novel he writes.
Similar Reads
If The Midnight Train by Matt Haig hits the spot, the following may keep you in the same emotional weather.
- Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Verdict
The Midnight Train by Matt Haig is a tender, sometimes overly tender, novel about the cost of looking past your own life while you are living it. It is funny in places. It is sad in others. And it will not change the shape of the literary novel, and it does not try to. What it offers is a long, kind look at one ordinary man, his ordinary regrets, and the woman he loved badly when he was meant to love her well. By the time the train pulls into its final station, you may find yourself thinking about your own.
Read it slowly. Take your time. Slow and steady, as Wilbur’s piano teacher would say. You will get there in the end.