Thank you Addie C for introducing me three years ago to The Midnight Library, a book I loved, and now Matt Haig has come back with another book of magical realism, transporting us to the island of Ibiza in the Balearic Sea off Spain. 

The main character, 72-year-old Grace Winters, suffers from anhedonai, “the inability to feel pleasure, an unfeeling, a vague lingering sadness,” but not as intense as depression. She lost her son to a bike accident when he was only nine and lost her husband four years before the story starts (and according to an NPR interview with Haig, much of the emotional struggle he embeds into Grace is based on his own experience of depression in his 20s). 

But when a very old friend she has not seen in 40 years wills her a house on Ibiza, Grace, heads to this tiny island with a partying reputation but also a natural phenomenon: the Posidonia  seagrass, thought to be the oldest single organism on earth at 100,000 years old. 

And that’s when things get interesting. She’s there to find out what happened to her friend Christina, who gave her the house, but in order to do that, she has to immerse herself in Christina’s life and into the ocean and into the mystical powers of La Presencia. Magical realism has to be written really well for me to read without rolling my eyes, and much like he did in The Midnight Library, Haig swept me into this story with suspension of disbelief, something I seem to do more willingly when it relates to extraterrestrial possibilities than with religious ones. 

Grace’s self deprecation gets a little tiring at times, and later, when she has a new purpose in life, her positivity platitudes also become a little trite, but if you skim past those, you get a novel that’s part mystery part environmentalism, part love story, and part paranormality. The fusion of science and magic create the possibility of a life impossible–and a good read.