Twenty-seven hours before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat on her dilapidated sofa scrolling through other people’s happy lives, waiting for something to happen. She turned away from Nora, but her words were audible across the hushed room: ‘Oh no. She’s here now.’ The librarian’s face fell in shock. ‘I’d better get that.’Ī moment later, Nora watched Mrs Elm on the phone. Like I said last week, you could be a glaciologist. There are many different possible lives ahead of you. ‘Well, far be it from me to say, but there is more to this world than swimming really fast. The library was a little shelter of civilisation. Since her brother had left, she’d felt a bit unguarded out there. ‘See? With a brain like yours you can do anything.’Ī blond boy Nora recognised from a couple of years below her ran past outside the rain-speckled window.

Mrs Elm pulled a paper tissue from her sleeve and delicately blew her nose. ‘The rain is even worse on other planets.’ ‘Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. ‘Coldness and wetness don’t always go together,’ Nora told her. But she was also the person most on Nora’s wavelength in the entire school, and even on days when it wasn’t raining she would spend her afternoon break in the small library. Mrs Elm had short grey hair and a kind and mildly crinkled oval face sitting pale above her turtle-green polo neck. ‘I hate the cold and wet,’ added Mrs Elm, for emphasis. For instance, when she was a baby her mother had been so worried Nora’s left ear stuck out more than her right that she’d used sticky tape to address the situation, then disguised it beneath a woollen bonnet. It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction. But you could be anything you want to be, Nora. ‘Of course, you’re going to be worried about the exams. A knight hopping over the neat row of white pawns. ‘Nora dear, it’s natural to worry about your future,’ said the librarian, Mrs Elm, her eyes twinkling. She sat at a low table staring at a chess board. Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of the small library at Hazeldene School in the town of Bedford.

The midnight library a novel