Author: Matt Haig
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig has an intriguing premise that asks a question about starting anew when you thought your life was essentially over. The novel combines elements of mystery, magic, and adventure, but it fundamentally focuses on philosophical questions in a story about guilt, grief, aging, connection, and the possibility of beginning again.
Grace Winters is a retired math teacher whose life is uneventful and constrained by the weight of her past, including losing her son and then her husband. But everything changes when a long-lost friend leaves her a house in Ibiza, Spain. Grace goes to Ibiza to look at the house, change the environment, and find out what happened to her lost friend. But instead of a plain inheritance, she finds herself looking into the circumstances surrounding the death of her friend, which develops into a strange experience comprising aliens and extraordinary new abilities, which wreak havoc on everything Grace used to believe. Grace has to abandon her mathematical views of reason and what is humanly possible and slowly embraces what is happening, realizing how much of life we fail to see because we have decided in advance what reality is supposed to look like. There are some elements of math and physics that the author introduces when explaining Grace’s thoughts, beliefs, and initial reluctance to accept what happened to her friend, which I thought was interesting, particularly the writing about infinity.
This focus is familiar because Matt Haig often places ordinary people in extraordinary situations to discuss very human questions. In The Life Impossible, one such philosophical question is whether it can ever be too late to change, and that there is deep interconnectedness between people, nature and the world that surrounds us. Grace’s experience gradually challenges the boundaries she has placed between herself and other people and between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The result is a novel concerned not simply with escaping the past, but with learning how to live differently in the present.
The Life Impossible is therefore more than an adventure set beneath the Mediterranean sun. It is a story about recovering curiosity after loss, forgiving ourselves for things we cannot change, and remaining open to the possibility that life may still surprise us. A life can appear impossible from the outside, or even to the person living it, until something happens that changes the limits of what they believe is possible.
Thank you for reading!