Matt Haig: The Midnight Train
Bestselling author Matt Haig discusses his new novel expanding the world of The Midnight Library, plus his ongoing exploration of mental health and the life well lived.
Why we picked this
Haig writes about mental health from the inside — not as a theme but as the actual texture of experience. The Midnight Train returns to a fictional universe that gave millions of readers permission to imagine their lives differently.
The Athenaeum Center hosts an evening with Matt Haig, whose novel The Midnight Library became one of the defining books of the pandemic years — a story about regret, possibility, and the quiet decision to keep living. His follow-up, The Midnight Train, expands that same universe, and this conversation will trace the choices that go into a life well lived alongside Haig’s ongoing candor about his own journey with mental health. A book signing follows the event, and most tickets include a copy of The Midnight Train.
Haig is a #1 New York Times bestselling author whose fiction includes How to Stop Time and The Life Impossible, alongside the memoirs Reasons to Stay Alive and Notes on a Nervous Planet — books that made him one of the most widely read writers on anxiety and depression. Where most authors treat mental health as subject matter, Haig treats it as lived reality that shapes every sentence, and his audiences tend to feel that difference acutely.
The evening covers Haig’s new novel but ranges into the broader questions: what makes a life feel worth living, what the imagination can offer that therapy or medication cannot, and how fiction can hold space for the experience of being human in ways that nonfiction often cannot. Open captions and assistive listening devices are available.