The Life Impossible
By Matt Haig
Blurb
'What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet . . .'
When retired Maths teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.
Among the rugged hills and golden beaches Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.
Our Review
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig is an unnusual book full of magical realism and initially I was sure what to make of it.
The book begins with retired school teacher Grace Winters receiving an email from an old pupil who was having a rough time.
"I look at what is happening in the world and I see that our whole species is on a path to destruction. Like it programmed, another pattern. And I just get fed up with being a human, being this small tiny thing that can't do anything about this world. Everything feels impossible."
Grace shares her story with him, an unbelievable story at that.
"What I am about to tell you is a story even I find hard to believe."
Grace Winters stopped having a purpose in life when her son was killed in a traffic accident back in 1992. She has lived wirh the guilt ever since. Now she lives alone in a bungalow in Lincoln after the death of her husband. She lives a lonely existance, the only things that spark joy are the birds outside her window.
Being from Lincoln myself it was quite jarring to see it mentioned casually so frequently within the text. It made me realise how few books I have read which mention it.
"Once upon a time there was an old woman who rarely left her bungalow, except to see the doctor, help at the charity shop, or visit the cemetary. She didn't garden any more. The grass was overgrown, and the flowerbeds were full of weeds. She did her weekly shopping. She lived in the Midlands, Lincoln, Lincolnshire. The same orange-bricked market town that she had stayed in - apart from a brief stint at Hull Ubiversity centuries ago - all her adult life.
You know the place.
And it wasn't so bad, but it's streets were less welcoming than they used to be. It was hard to see her fond memories covered in chipboard and ripped posters."
A change comes in her life when a colleague she once showed kindness to leaves her a villa in Ibiza , once there a change comes over her and Grace learns what it means to trully live.
I enjoyed the ecological slant to this speculative fiction and the different light in which Matt Haig showed this susposed party island.
Our Final Rating...
Read & Shared 22 Times.
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