13 Books Like The Midnight Library, Sorted by How Much Magic

France, 1714. Addie does not want the marriage waiting for her, so she prays after dark to whatever answers, and something does. She gets three hundred years. The price is that nobody can remember her: not lovers, not friends, not the woman who sold her bread an hour ago. The book follows her across centuries of being a ghost with a pulse, until she walks into a New York bookshop and the boy behind the counter says he remembers her. It moves slowly on purpose, and the middle stretch teaches the same lesson more than once.

Every time Ursula dies, and she dies often, the book restarts her at birth carrying only a faint dread of whatever went wrong. A drowning at the beach, the 1918 flu, a bad marriage, the Blitz. She learns without ever consciously knowing, and steers a little differently each round. Atkinson uses the device to write twentieth century England from the inside, and the London bombing chapters are among the best I have read anywhere. This is not a comfort read. It is a novel that keeps killing a girl you like, and it means it.

This is the book that invented the shelf. A radio executive with a dead marriage has a heart attack in 1988 and wakes up in his university room in 1963, twenty five years younger and knowing exactly what is coming. So he does the obvious things: bets on the horses, gets rich, marries better. Then he dies again at the same hour of the same day, and starts over. Grimwood keeps running the loop and keeps asking a harder question each round, until money and control run out of answers and the man has to work out what a life is even for.

The rules are strict and slightly absurd. You cannot leave the seat, you cannot change the present, and if the coffee goes cold before you come back you stay a ghost in that chair forever. Four people use it anyway: a woman whose boyfriend left for America, a man whose wife is losing her memory, two sisters, a mother. Because the past cannot be altered, every trip is really about saying the thing that went unsaid. Kawaguchi wrote it as a play first and you can feel that, since the whole book happens in one small room with people entering and leaving.

Linus Baker spends his days in a grey office writing reports on magical orphanages for a department that does not much like magic. Then he is posted for a month to an island house holding six children, one of whom is the literal Antichrist, plus the man who raises them. Nothing especially terrible happens on that island. That is the entire point of the book. It is a story about a bureaucrat learning that the correct response to difference is not paperwork, and it is sweet in a way that will either be exactly what you need or slightly too much sugar.

Tom Hazard has a condition that slows ageing to a crawl, which means he has watched Elizabethan theatre from the pit, crossed oceans on a wooden ship, and buried the woman he married four hundred years ago. A society of others like him protects the secret and enforces a single law: no attachments. Now he teaches history to teenagers who have no idea he was there for it. Haig alternates present-day school corridors with the past, and the past is where the book comes alive. The love story is thinner than the loneliness, which is a pity, because the loneliness is very well done.

The narrator is not human. He is sent to Earth wearing the body of Professor Andrew Martin, with orders to erase a mathematical proof and everybody who knows about it. He arrives disgusted: clothes are ridiculous, faces are ugly, the species is violent and doomed. Then he meets wine, peanut butter, the poems of Emily Dickinson, the family dog, and a teenage son who is quietly falling apart. The comedy of an outsider describing our habits carries the first half, and the second half turns warm without ever going sticky, which is a harder trick than it looks.

Klara is an AF, an artificial friend built to keep a lonely child company, and she narrates the entire book in a voice that is polite, watchful and slightly off. She worships the sun, because the sun feeds her, and she builds a private theology around it that the reader can see through and she cannot. The world outside is sketched rather than explained: children are lifted or not lifted, families are strained, work has vanished for a lot of adults. Ishiguro withholds nearly everything and lets you assemble the horror yourself. Very little happens loudly and it wrecks you anyway.

One morning the boxes arrive, one for every adult on the planet, each holding a string that measures the years you have left. Nobody knows who sent them and the book is not interested in finding out. It is interested in what happens next: dating apps that ask for your string length, employers who want to check, a political campaign built on the split between long-stringers and short-stringers. Erlick follows a handful of connected characters through the first year of it. The premise is stronger than the writing, which is smooth and a bit soft, but the questions will follow you to dinner.

Tova Sullivan is seventy, cleans the aquarium after closing, and lost her son to the water thirty years ago with no explanation ever offered. Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus nearing the end of his lifespan: brilliant, contemptuous of humans, and able to escape his tank whenever he feels like it. Some chapters are his. He works out what happened to Tova's boy long before she does, and then has the problem of being an octopus with no way to tell her. It sounds unbearable and it is not, because the octopus is funny and the grief is real.

The structure is simple and it works. Five chapters, five people at a dead end: a shop assistant who wants a different career, an accountant who dreams of an antiques shop, a new mother who has lost her job, a retired man with nothing to fill the day. Each of them wanders into the community library, and Sayuri Komachi, who is very large, very still and always busy needle-felting small toys, prints out a reading list with one strange title on it and hands over a felt charm. Nothing supernatural happens. People simply pay attention to their own lives for the first time in years.

Ove is fifty nine, recently widowed, recently made redundant, and has decided to go and join his wife. Every attempt gets ruined by his neighbours: a pregnant Iranian woman who will not stop feeding him, a cat that will not leave, a teenager who needs a lift, a man who cannot reverse a trailer. Backman cuts between the present-day comedy and the past, and the past is where he gets you: how Ove met Sonja, what happened to them, and why a man like this ended up with rules where his words should be.

Keiko has never understood how to be a person. As a child she ended a playground fight by hitting one of the boys with a spade, because that was the efficient solution, and she learned from the reaction that she would have to copy other people to pass as normal. The convenience store saved her: it has a manual, a uniform, a script, and a correct way to greet a customer. Eighteen years in, she is calm and useful and entirely herself. Her family and friends keep asking when she will get a proper job or a husband. The novel is short, cold, funny and quietly furious.