The author of the phenomenally successful 2020 novel The Midnight Library had intended to give up writing - until he faced up to his past.
is another work of magical realism, this time with a grumpy, depressed 72-year-old protagonist. Former maths teacher Grace, recently widowed and still suffering from the death of her young son years earlier, is bequeathed a house on the Spanish island of Ibiza by a colleague she hadn’t spoken to in decades.
“Partly because of the story but also because I’d given up writing, and I was only going to write again if I had the right idea,” he says over Zoom from Brighton in England where he lives with his wife and two children. Those “real-world” ideas were “the cliche of a bookshop” and a sober bar, “because I’m a male who stopped drinking”, he says. “I thought I’d do a place that was beautiful and hedonistic and not at all worthy or earnest.” He then realised, partly thanks to a recent ADHD diagnosis, that he wasn’t a “perfect multitasking business owner” type.During this non-writing period, Haig took a trip to Ibiza - scene of the aforementioned breakdown - to “face up to his past”.
In Ibiza, he heard about the Posidonia Oceanica, an ancient seagrass that grows like an underwater meadow off Ibiza’s coast, which is an integral part of the story. That, and other supposed mystical elements of the Spanish island, appealed to him.“I’ve lived there, I lost my mind there, and I … found my ability to heal again there, so I wanted to write this wild, weird novel,” he says. “was quite an outward-facing novel, in the sense that I was very reader-conscious with it.
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