The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Another captivating, highly entertaining, profoundly moving novel by Matt Haig!



I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.



I thought incessantly about it.



I didn’t want to put it down!



There are so many messages in this novel that it is hard to unpack them. Grace Winters is a retired maths teacher who has suffered much loss in her life – and she fully blames herself for much of that loss and unhappiness.



One of Grace’s former students has reached out to her via a despairing email, seeking some advice. His life is a shambles and his sister needs special medical care which he can’t afford to give her.



Grace responds by recounting the events of the last few years, which led her to relocate to Ibiza. No magic wand was waved to erase her unhappy past, but – if we are to believe her – some form of extraterrestrial power DID change Grace’s life.



I was a tad worried that Haig kept referring to higher math and verbally dissecting equations – something I was NEVER good at! But I need not have feared: he made it all sound interesting and his conclusions had me thinking very deep thoughts, indeed!



We all have a bit of Grace Winters in us. We’ve all made mistakes, held on to the past for too long, deeply regretted that one decision or action that changed the course of our lives, etc., etc. Grace, like so many of us, was marking time. Our adventures were over: let the younger folk save the world, or blast it to bits. Nothing to do with her, she thought. She’d done enough harm in her own little corner of the world.



When a letter arrived, out of the blue, advising her that she had been left a house on the island of Ibiza by an old acquaintance, Grace started off an adventure that would have challenged much younger folk.



I thoroughly enjoyed this novel: it had a bit of everything in it. Magical Realism, in the hands of an expert like Matt Haig, is always a pleasure to read. I highly recommend this heart soothing book: we can’t change the path, but we can learn to truly forgive ourselves and shape a better future for our remaining days. Grace left me feeling so….. hmm, hard to describe this…. hopeful?!?!





View all my reviews