Author Guide
Matt Haig Books in Order
All Matt Haig books — fiction and nonfiction. From The Midnight Library to Reasons to Stay Alive: hopeful, life-affirming books for difficult times.
✨ Literary Fiction
💙 Mental Health Themes
🌍 Global Bestseller
About Matt Haig
Matt Haig is a British author who writes across fiction, nonfiction, and children's books. He's best known for The Midnight Library (2020), which spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, and Reasons to Stay Alive (2015), a memoir about recovering from severe depression and anxiety in his twenties.
Haig's work is defined by its warmth and its willingness to tackle big questions — about regret, identity, mortality, and what makes life worth living — through approachable, emotionally direct storytelling. His books have an unusual quality: they make people feel less alone.
He has spoken openly about mental health for years, long before it became mainstream to do so. His memoir helped launch a broader conversation about depression that continues to this day.
2018 — Nonfiction
Notes on a Nervous Planet
On anxiety and the modern world
A reflection on how modern life — social media, news cycles, constant connectivity — makes anxiety worse, and what we can do about it. Looser and more wide-ranging than Reasons to Stay Alive, but equally compassionate.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Midnight Library depressing?
Despite its premise (a woman between life and death), The Midnight Library is ultimately a profoundly hopeful and life-affirming book. It deals honestly with suicidal ideation and regret, but arrives at a warm, meaningful conclusion. Most readers describe feeling uplifted rather than sad after finishing it.
Are Matt Haig's fiction books connected?
No — all his adult fiction novels are standalone. You can read them in any order. Each exists in its own world with its own characters. Only his children's A Boy Called Christmas series requires reading in order.