Nora Seed is a failure, at least that is what she thinks of herself. She could have been an Olympian swimmer but stopped swimming. She wanted to be a singer but only works in a music shop from where she has just been sacked. Furthermore, she has no one in her life, except her cat that has just died. Her parents are dead and she doesn’t see her brother anymore. Confronted with this, she decides to end her life. Between life and death, she discovers this library, a library with the book of regrets, every single one of her life, but also with books of other parallel lives she has lived, like a tree, where every decision you take in life makes you follow a different branch. The life where she became this Olympian swimmer, the life where she was this internationally renown singer, the one where she was a glaciologist, the one where she has a perfect life with a husband a child, a nice house and a job as a philosophy teacher. She likes some of these lives, others she doesn’t, but gradually she can see that something is always missing… her true life… to which she finally returns. Slowly through the book, the conclusion of the story is easy to guess, but the narration is well constructed and raises loads of questions… Could I have had a better life, made better choices, or just understand that where I am is my path and make the best of it ? A very touching story.
“She would accept the darkness of life in a way she never had, not as failure but as part of a totality, as something that threw other things into relief, into growth, into being. The ash in the soil.”
Read and listened to as an audiobook