- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Matt Haig has built a career around asking deceptively simple questions. What if you could live another life? What if you could revisit your regrets? What if you had one final opportunity to understand the person you became? In The Midnight Train, he returns to familiar territory, but instead of exploring the lives we never lived, he examines the life we already have—and the quiet choices that slowly shape it.
Wilbur Budd is eighty-one years old when he dies. A successful bookseller who built a small independent shop into a national empire, he leaves behind wealth, prestige and a lifetime of achievement. He also leaves behind an empty house, broken relationships, and a marriage that quietly slipped away while he was too busy building a future that never quite arrived. Moments after his death, Wilbur finds himself aboard the mysterious Midnight Train, travelling backwards through his own life, revisiting the moments that defined him, wounded him and ultimately changed him.
The premise is unmistakably Matt Haig. Readers familiar with The Midnight Library will immediately recognise his fascination with liminal spaces that sit somewhere between life and death, reality and imagination. Yet The Midnight Train feels less concerned with possibility than consequence. This isn't a novel about countless alternative lives. It is about understanding the one life that mattered all along.
Wilbur's life isn't destroyed by a single catastrophic decision. Instead, it's slowly eroded by hundreds of small choices that all seem reasonable in the moment. Another business trip. Another expansion. Another promise to spend more time with the people he loves once things settle down. The tragedy isn't that he stopped loving his wife, Maggie, but that he gradually stopped paying attention to her.
One of the most effective ideas running through the book is the relationship between ambition and avoidance. Wilbur convinces himself that he's working to build security after a childhood marked by grief and poverty, but Haig gently reveals something much more painful beneath the surface. Work becomes a refuge from emotions he never truly processes. Success becomes an anaesthetic rather than a destination. Every promotion, acquisition and milestone allows him to postpone dealing with the trauma he carries, until eventually the life he has built no longer resembles the one he once dreamed of living.
For anyone who's ever convinced themselves that life will begin once work calms down, once the mortgage is smaller, once retirement arrives, or once there's finally enough time, that message lands with uncomfortable honesty.
I also appreciated the novel's treatment of grief. Rather than presenting healing as something that happens naturally with time, Haig suggests that pain left untouched simply changes shape. Wilbur spends decades avoiding the site of the accident that killed his brother, refusing to speak openly about what happened or acknowledging how profoundly it altered him. His grief doesn't disappear; it just governs almost every decision he makes thereafter. It influences his marriage, his friendships, his relationship with his mother, and even the kind of businessman he becomes.
The symbolism throughout the novel is elegant without becoming heavy-handed. The Midnight Train itself serves as a beautiful metaphor for memory, reflection and the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives. I really enjoyed the recurring imagery surrounding books and bookshops. Books begin as places of refuge, curiosity and human connection before gradually becoming little more than products on a balance sheet. It's a subtle but effective reflection of Wilbur's own transformation, and perhaps one of the strongest examples of the novel's central message that success means very little if it costs us the very things we once loved.
Maggie is another of the novel's great strengths. She could easily have become little more than the wife left waiting at home while her husband chased success, but Haig gives her warmth, intelligence and emotional depth. She understands Wilbur long before he understands himself, and her eventual decision to leave never feels punitive. Instead, it feels heartbreakingly inevitable. She doesn't stop loving him; she simply reaches the point where loving him is no longer enough.
Haig also deserves credit for the accessibility of his writing. He has an extraordinary ability to explore philosophical ideas without making them feel intimidating. Questions about identity, mortality, regret, memory and purpose are woven naturally into the narrative rather than delivered as lectures. The result is a novel that feels thoughtful without ever becoming inaccessible.
That said, The Midnight Train isn't quite as emotionally devastating or as original as I'd hoped.
Readers who loved The Midnight Library will recognise many familiar ideas, and at times the novel feels as though it revisits philosophical territory Haig has already explored. Some of its life lessons are delivered very directly, occasionally sacrificing subtlety for clarity. There were moments where I would have preferred the story to trust the reader a little more rather than explicitly stating its message.
I also found the final act a little too tidy. The emotional payoff is satisfying, but it wraps everything together with a neatness that slightly softens the complexity that came before it. Life rarely offers perfect resolutions, and I found myself wondering whether a more ambiguous ending might have been more effective.
But those reservations never diminished my enjoyment. This is ultimately a novel about presence. It asks what happens when we become so preoccupied with creating a better future that we stop noticing the extraordinary ordinariness of the life already unfolding around us. It reminds us that careers end, businesses are sold, achievements fade and reputations disappear, but the conversations we don't have, the people we fail to truly see, and the love we neglect often become our greatest regrets.
One line, in particular, encapsulates the novel beautifully: "These are the good old days. We are living them." It is a deceptively simple idea, but perhaps one of the hardest truths to remember while we are busy rushing towards tomorrow.
The Midnight Train may not surpass The Midnight Library, but it stands comfortably beside it as another compassionate exploration of grief, purpose and what it means to build a life worth remembering. It 's gentle, reflective and quietly moving, offering the kind of reminder many of us need from time to time: that the richest lives are rarely measured by what we accumulate, but by who we choose to notice while we're here.
I confess to writing these reviews in reverse, the review for The Midnight Library will follow.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Book Details
The Midnight Train by Matt Haig
Paperback ISBN
978-1837262823 (Canongate UK paperback edition)
Hardcover ISBN
978-0593833377 (Viking US hardcover edition)
eBook ISBN
978-0593833377 (Penguin Publishing Group eBook edition)
Genre
Speculative Fiction; Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Contemporary Fiction
Subgenre
Philosophical Fiction; Time-Travel Fiction; Psychological Fiction; Literary Fantasy; Afterlife Fiction
Tropes / Literary Threads
Life review; second chances; regret; grief and healing; love and marriage; emotional neglect; books about books; bookshops; time travel; found purpose; memory; mortality; survivor's guilt; family trauma; post-war Britain; working-class Britain; ambition versus contentment; mental health; self-discovery; redemption; alternate futures; forgiveness; nostalgia; coming to terms with the past; emotional healing; philosophical fiction; magical realism; choosing presence over success.
Publisher
Viking (US); Canongate (UK & Commonwealth)
Series
The Midnight World
Series Order
Book 2 (Companion Novel to The Midnight Library)
Formats Available
Hardcover; Paperback; eBook; Audiobook
Audiobook Narrator
James Norton
Release Date
26 May 2026
Page Count
304 pages (hardcover edition)
Where to Buy The Midnight Train by Matt Haig
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Danielle Robinson is a literary critic and writer whose work explores literature through the lens of atmosphere, memory, culture, and emotional experience. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she combines academic insight with a deeply refined aesthetic sensibility shaped by more than three decades working across the creative industries as an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist, fashion stylist, and interior stager.
She reads widely and rigorously, reading and reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through Silk & Sentences, Danielle approaches literature as something immersive and lived with — not simply stories to consume, but works that shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
She writes from her semi-rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, their dogs Oscar and Paige, and an ever-growing library of books.
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