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When retired math 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 of the island, 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.
I don’t read much fiction, but enjoyed Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (highly recommended, by the way), so I decided to give his latest book The Life Impossible a try.
It, too, didn’t disappoint.
It’s an epistolary novel of sorts: a novel told through letters, in this case, one long letter from a retired math teacher from England to a former student having a tough time who decides to write to her.
The teacher, Grace Winters, has seen her share of rough times.
Her only child died young in a tragic bicycle accident, for which she’s felt guilty ever since and from which she’s never fully recovered. She’s also been left alone with the death of her husband and can’t say that she’s really been living. When a former colleague Christina to whom she was once one kind decades ago leaves her a house in Ibiza following her mysterious death, Grace decides to leave all that’s familiar and routine.
The Life Impossible centers around Grace’s search for answers about Christina, as well as the Ibicencos’ love of their island and their dedication to preserving its natural environment in the face of commercialization, big money, and power on the level that few on the island could have imagined. Grace finds herself at the epicenter of this fight, digging in with a cast of characters who embody some of the best of what it means to be human.
Among the reasons that I enjoy Haig’s work is that his characters find healing, purpose, and strength. Grace’s sojourn to Ibiza is transformative. There, Grace finds she is not the ordinary person she always thought herself to be, but is, in fact, something quite extraordinary. The same could be said for us all.
Grace’s journey holds myriad lessons, not the least of which is to enjoy every glass of orange juice.
If you know, you know. - Katina, Area Librarian