An original BookTok relic The Midnight Library is being revived nearly six years after its film rights were sold. Florence Pugh will produce and star as the novel’s main character, Nora Seed, a woman who finds herself in a library between life and death and who reads alternative realities of her own life in the library’s vast catalog.
The Midnight Library was published August 13, 2020 and was a part of the first wave of #BookTok favorites alongside titles like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Song of Achilles, and It Ends With Us. #BookTok is a TikTok hashtag that became a trend and then a community in 2020, largely due to the pandemic and people trying to find ways to pass the time. Reading became an extremely popular pastime and discussions about novels on the app helped launch many books to commercial success.
Today, The Midnight Library has over 2 million ratings on Goodreads and has prompted author, Matt Haig, to release another “Midnight World” novel published May 26 titled The Midnight Train. That novel is set in the same world as The Midnight Library and follows main character Wilbur on his honeymoon with his love interest Maggie but then he “gives it all away” and “wishes he could go back and live differently.” Goodreads describes it as “a magical time-traveling love story.”
The Midnight Library was predicted to be one of the biggest deals to come out of the Cannes film festival and producers were approached by multiple studios, but where the movie will end up and for how much is still unknown.
