It’s 10:47pm on a Tuesday. The school WhatsApp group has erupted over whether next week’s cake sale should be nut-free or nut-aware. Someone’s posted a passive-aggressive meme about parking by the Year 2 entrance. Your phone pings again. LinkedIn wants you to know a bloke you met at a conference in 2019 has just celebrated three years at a company you’ve never heard of.
This is when you reach for a book.
Not just any book. A proper one. The kind where someone sensible narrates you out of your own life and into somewhere quieter, stranger, or just plain better-lit.
If you’re reading this, odds are you already know the feeling. You’ve read The Midnight Library. You loved it. You cried at the library bit, pretended you didn’t, and then cried again three days later in the Ford Kuga because The Waterboys came on and your brain decided that’s quite enough of that.
This post is for people who finished Haig’s book and needed something else to climb into. Quiet escapism. Books where the stakes are human-sized and nobody’s wearing a prophecy. Just good stories that let you forget you’ve got a dentist appointment on Thursday.
Why The Midnight Library hit the way it did
Matt Haig’s book sold by the articulated lorry-load for a reason. It took the most bog-standard human question, the one that never quite shuts up, and made it feel achievable rather than fantastical. No time machine. No magic system you need to memorise. Just a library, some books, and a quietly devastating sequence of parallel lives.
The appeal isn’t escape into another world. It’s escape into a different version of this one. Same coffee. Same weather. Different decisions.
If that’s what did it for you, the list below is calibrated to the exact same frequency. Books where the strangeness stays small and the feelings go enormous.
1. The Humans by Matt Haig
Starting with the obvious. If The Midnight Library scratched an itch, Haig’s earlier novel about an alien sent to Earth to inhabit the body of a Cambridge mathematician will scratch a slightly weirder one. The alien is supposed to kill the professor’s family. He hasn’t factored in peanut butter, dogs, or the Beach Boys.
It’s funnier than Midnight Library and considerably odder. There’s a section about hair that will stay with you for years. The whole thing reads like a very British philosophy lecture delivered by someone who’s just discovered biscuits.
2. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
This one requires trust. The first fifty pages feel like you’ve walked into a lecture on Renaissance architecture by mistake. Then it clicks, and you realise you’re inside the strangest and most beautiful mind in modern British fiction.
A man lives in an infinite house full of statues and tides. He keeps a journal. He calls the birds his friends. There’s another person in the house, possibly. The whole novel is a puzzle-box of grief, memory, and what it means to be content with very little.
Perfect Midnight Library pairing because the escape isn’t into excitement. It’s into stillness. Reading it feels like someone’s turned the world down by two notches.
3. No Easy Deeds by Keith A Pearson
Including my own book here feels a bit like inviting yourself to your own birthday party, but hear me out.
No Easy Deeds is set in 1989. Danny Monk is 28. He’s lost his job, his fiancée, and any sense his life is heading somewhere sensible. He’s stuck in negative equity on a flat he can’t sell, trying to flog houses he can barely afford himself. And then he meets a woman called Mrs Weller, and things get considerably stranger.
It’s the Midnight Library “what if I’d chosen differently” question played out against a backdrop of shoulder pads, Ford Sierras, and the sort of economic anxiety that makes 2026 feel like a gentle picnic. There’s a quiet time-travel element threaded through it, but the real story is whether a bloke who’s made every wrong move can find his way back to something resembling a life.
If you liked Midnight Library for the emotional honesty rather than the hopping-between-lives mechanic, this might be your sort of thing. Have a look here. Readers seem to agree.
4. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
The most direct Midnight Library sibling on this list, and one of the few books that makes you properly miss drinking coffee.
A small café in a Tokyo alley. Sit in one specific chair, order one specific coffee, and you can travel back to a single moment in your past. The catch: you can’t change anything in the present. You come back whether you like it or not. And you have to be finished before the coffee gets cold.
It’s four linked stories about grief, missed chances, and what people actually do with time travel when the rules stop them being heroic. Very quiet. Very Japanese. The sort of book you read in one sitting and then sit staring at the wall for forty minutes.
5. The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
If Midnight Library made you cry in a hopeful way, this will finish the job.
Linus Baker is a case worker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He lives alone with a cat called Calliope, a sunflower that never blooms, and a framed motto about rules. He gets dispatched to a remote island orphanage where six rather unusual children live under the care of a man called Arthur Parnassus.
That’s it. That’s the book. Nothing bad really happens. There are no villains, no twists waiting in the final act, nothing apocalyptic at all. Just a lonely middle-aged man slowly discovering his life might still contain surprises, and a cast of children including a small boy called Lucy who may or may not be the Antichrist.
Read it in December with the heating on high. You’ll thank me.
6. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
A 70-year-old widow called Tova cleans an aquarium at night. A giant Pacific octopus called Marcellus escapes his tank regularly to eat sea cucumbers and judge the humans. Together they solve a thirty-year-old mystery.
I promise it’s better than it sounds.
The octopus narrates some of the chapters. He’s impatient, clever, and absolutely certain humans are idiots. Tova is grieving and methodical. A young man called Cameron drifts into the town looking for answers about his past. The three storylines converge with the sort of quiet inevitability good novels pull off without you noticing.
It’s hopeful without being syrupy. Sad without being miserable. The kind of book you want to press into the hands of your mum.
7. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Early 1960s California. Elizabeth Zott is a chemist who refuses to be anything less than a chemist, which in 1961 makes her roughly as popular as a tax inspector at a wedding. She loses her job, gains a child, and ends up hosting a cookery programme on daytime TV while secretly teaching housewives about atoms.
Also there’s a dog called Six-Thirty who narrates parts of the book and has strong opinions about vocabulary.
Part period piece, part feminist novel, part against-the-odds comedy, with a dog. The escape isn’t into another world. It’s into the peculiar satisfaction of watching someone who’s absolutely correct refuse to shut up, regardless of the consequences.
Perfect for Midnight Library readers because Elizabeth’s life is, in its way, a parallel one. She ends up somewhere she never planned. Some of the paths not taken turn out to be the point.
8. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
A young French woman in 1714 makes a bargain with the wrong god to avoid an arranged marriage. She gets immortality and freedom. The price is that nobody remembers her the moment she leaves the room.
Three hundred years later, in a New York bookshop, a man says three words to her: “I remember you.”
Schwab’s novel is the most ambitious book on this list. It’s sprawling. It covers centuries. The prose occasionally goes a bit French-film-poster, but when it lands, it lands hard. The central question it asks is what kind of mark you leave on a world that refuses to acknowledge you. Which, if you think about it, is also The Midnight Library‘s.
A quick word on escapism
The word “escapism” has picked up a slight whiff over the years, as though reading a nice book is somehow a dereliction of your duties as a citizen. It isn’t. Most of the people I know who read a lot are the calmest people in their postcodes. They don’t sigh loudly in queues. They don’t send “just bumping this” emails at 9:47pm. The ones who never read are usually the ones shouting at a self-service till about an unexpected item in the bagging area — and honestly, that tracks.
Read the books. Ignore reality for a bit. You’ll come back a better person, or at least a slightly less twitchy one.
Where to start
If you want something as close to Midnight Library as possible, start with Before the Coffee Gets Cold. If you want weirder, Piranesi. If you want warmer, Cerulean Sea. If you fancy a weekend in 1989 with a skint estate agent and a slow-burn mystery, No Easy Deeds is right here.
And if you haven’t actually read The Midnight Library yet, well, start with my post on that one and then come back.
Reality will still be waiting when you come back. The school WhatsApp group will still be arguing about cake. LinkedIn will still want you to congratulate someone. The boiler will probably still be making that noise.
But for four hundred pages, you won’t care. And sometimes four hundred pages is the whole point.
Happy reading.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a book similar to The Midnight Library?
Generally: human-sized stakes, a gentle speculative element, emotional honesty, and a hopeful streak that never tips into sickly. Matt Haig’s book sits in a specific corner of modern fiction, warm and slightly strange and quietly devastating, and the books on this list share that corner.
Is The Midnight Library based on a true story?
No. It’s a novel. Matt Haig has written openly about his own struggles with depression, and the book’s emotional core draws on that honesty, but the library itself is a device, not a place you can visit in Shropshire.
Are any of these books available on Kindle Unlimited?
Availability shifts, but as of writing, a fair chunk of indie-published fiction (including mine) sits on Kindle Unlimited. The major-press titles like Midnight Library, Cerulean Sea and Remarkably Bright Creatures generally aren’t. Check before you click.
What should I read after Piranesi?
If Piranesi left you wanting more strangeness, try Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by the same author, or The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. If you want the stillness without the weirdness, swing back around to Before the Coffee Gets Cold.