“I am not special,” says Grace Winters, the narrator of Matt Haig’s follow-up to his bestseller The Midnight Library. “I am a crotchety old Brit. I am a retired maths teacher from the middle of nowhere. I am a big nothing, is who I am.” But as you might suspect if you’re familiar with Haig’s habit of conjuring the extraordinary out of the ordinary, Grace is far from being a big nothing. When she unexpectedly finds herself on the island of Ibiza, she realises just how much of a something she really is.
A small, long-ago act of kindness towards her colleague Christina leads to Grace being bequeathed a house in the Balearics in Christina’s will. Puzzled as to why a virtual stranger would do such a thing, Grace, recently widowed and still carrying guilt from the childhood death of her son, decides to visit Ibiza to find out, and to investigate Christina’s drowning there. It will be a distraction from her own problems, because “joint pain is like grief, the more you think about it, the more it hurts”.
