In his bestselling 2020 novel, The Midnight Library, Matt Haig told the story of a woman, who, after deciding to end her life, finds herself transported to a new metaphysical plane in the form of a magical library. With his new book, Haig sticks to our ordinary world and makes it magical, which makes The Life Impossible an instantly engrossing, page-turning delight.

The Life Impossible begins with an email, a very ordinary thing, from a former student to retired math teacher Grace Winters. The student, now studying math at a university, shares his grief and despair, and Grace responds with kindness, then sets out to soothe the student’s aching soul by telling the story of a life-changing experience that recently happened to her. Her story, attached to the email as a manuscript, forms the rest of the novel.

A widow living a quiet life in England, Grace is surprised to receive word that a friend she hasn’t spoken to in decades has bequeathed her a house in Ibiza, Spain. Intrigued by the mystery of this gift, Grace heads to Ibiza to unravel the saga of how she came to be left the house, and to learn how her old friend died.

What she finds when she arrives is something much more complex than the unexpected inheritance. Grace, it seems, has been chosen for something that her rational math teacher’s mind struggles to understand, let alone embrace. As she draws closer to the secrets of her friend’s life, she comes to realize that Ibiza could change her own life, not just through its natural beauty and charming, energetic residents, but through a supernatural power.

Grace narrates the action not like a novelist, but like a human searching for meaning in the strangeness of her reality. Haig’s attention to detail and pacing never flags, and neither does his commitment to Grace’s voice, which is resonant with her insecurities, fears and confusion over what’s happening to her. This remarkable balance allows Haig to insert humor, heart and a kind of palpable power into the narrative, and it works extremely well. 

Even beyond the novel’s structural charms, of which there are many, The Life Impossible succeeds because of Haig’s ability to treat Grace’s journey not as a straight line, but as a vibrant interconnected web. As in our own lives, things that happened to Grace as a much younger woman ripple down through the decades, with often unexpected bearings on her present and the future she seeks. Though it deploys familiar fantastic elements, this is a book that refuses oversimplification through genre: It’s part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one’s self. Like the bright, yearning human being at its center, it pulses with life, which makes it well worth reading for anyone who wants a hopeful, warm, very human journey that crackles with magic.

Gretchen Sparks, a reporter for a down-at-the-heels New York City newspaper, and the protagonist of Erica Ciccarone’s Borough Features, is a delicious conundrum. She’s not exactly unlikable, but she’s someone you’d best be wary around. She’s an alcoholic and doesn’t seem to understand social cues. Maybe her problematic nature stems from her crazy family, which includes her cloying, long-suffering mother; her father, now afflicted with dementia; and her selfish, silly sister Nico. Some of Gretchen’s troubles certainly stem from her grief over the death of her brother Dominic, a medic killed in Afghanistan.

If anyone loves and understands Gretchen Sparks unconditionally and without drama, it’s her editor, Marty. When the book opens, he’s in the hospital thanks to a heart attack, and it doesn’t look good. Marty and Gretchen are so close that his wife asks Gretchen to write his obituary when the time comes.

Marty is, or was, deeply interested in the local color of the outer boroughs, and when we meet Gretchen, she’s on her way to fulfill his last assignment to her: interview a loony Coney Island lady who claims to have a crime-fighting seagull. Soon after this, she meets a boy named Jaime Padilla, who also has an interesting story. Gretchen and the reader quickly find out that Jaime’s tale is but a tiny piece of a much larger and nastier puzzle. As eager to get to the bottom of a story as ever, Gretchen gets pulled right in.

Ciccarone, who is an associate editor at BookPage, knows much about the folkways, to say nothing of the skeevy politics, of Brooklyn and Queens. Her characters—ridiculous, creepy, heartbreaking and always human—are memorable, none more so than Gretchen Sparks, a woman as devastatingly vulnerable as she is hard and cynical. Borough Features is a great debut.