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Audiobook details
A journey back through a life almost forgotten
Wilbur has lived a long life, though not necessarily the one he intended. He married Maggie, loved her completely, and then, somewhere along the way, he let that love slip through choices he didn't fully understand at the time. When a heart attack takes him, death is not quite what he expects. A train is waiting. Not to carry him forward, but backward, through the moments that counted most.
Guided by Agnes, a gentle presence from his earliest years, Wilbur moves through the stations of his own past as a ghost, instructed only to observe. But the rules of the journey bend when he finds himself standing in Venice in 1974, on the day of his honeymoon, watching a version of himself still whole enough to make a different choice. The temptation to intervene grows beyond what he can resist.
Set within the same world as The Midnight Library, this audiobook traces what happens when the desire to rewrite a single moment collides with the weight of everything that followed. It is a story about regret not as an affliction, but as a kind of late-arriving clarity, the understanding that love, once lived, cannot be erased even by death.
I went into this one expecting comfort. Matt Haig's name carries a particular promise now, and The Midnight Train delivers it, but not in a soft, unchallenging way. It earns its emotional weight by being honest about how badly people can love each other and still manage to ruin things.
The setup is simple on paper: Wilbur dies, boards a spectral train, and revisits his past. But what Haig does with that premise is more precise than the premise suggests. The book is less interested in the mechanics of time travel than it is in the quality of attention, what it means to finally see your own life clearly, without self-protection or nostalgia editing out the uncomfortable parts. Wilbur is not always sympathetic. He made a real mistake, the kind that compounds over decades, and the novel doesn't let him off easily.
The Venice sections, set in 1974, are where the book fully opens. There's a particular scene where Wilbur watches his younger self on a canal-side terrace, and the gap between who he was and who he became is almost physical. It stopped me. I had to put the audiobook down for a few minutes, which is perhaps the clearest measure of whether a story is working.
What surprised me was how unsentimentally the ending lands. This is not a book that rewards wishful thinking. It asks you to sit with things, and that is precisely what makes it stay with you after the last track ends.
James Norton's narration is a genuine asset here. His voice carries a kind of worn-in gravity that suits Wilbur at every age, and he modulates the Venice sequences with enough warmth to make the contrast with the present-day grief register properly. At 8 hours and 36 minutes, the pacing never drags. He reads as though he knows what the story costs.
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The Midnight Train by Matt Haig is the second novel set in the world of The Midnight Library, published by Canongate Books on May 26, 2026. It follows Wilbur, a recently deceased octogenarian, as he boards a mysterious train that carries him back through the defining moments of his life, with Agnes, a bookshop owner from his childhood, as his guide. The central pull of the story is Venice, 1974, and the choice he made there that he spent the rest of his life regretting.
Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, and hear James Norton bring Wilbur's story to life across 8 hours and 36 minutes of listening. Norton's narration gives the novel the intimacy it needs, moving between Wilbur's ghost-like present and the warmer textures of his past without losing the emotional thread.
The audiobook remains yours forever, even after the trial ends. The free trial also opens access to thousands of other titles, with no long-term commitment required. Start listening now.
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