Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast
from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury,
that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast,
but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the writer Matt Haig.
His work defies easy classification.
Almost 30 books encompassing magical realism, fantasy, memoir, novels, children's books and non-fiction.
One thing his devotees agree on, however, is that all his stories have the feel-good factor,
providing comfort and escape to millions around the world.
His smash hit The Midnight Library about a woman who finds herself in a library located somewhere
between life and death, trying out alternative versions of her life via the books on the shelves,
has sold 15 million copies, spent an entire year on the New York Times bestseller list,
and is his latest story to be adapted to the big screen.
Regret, like hers, is a recurring theme and something he struggles with himself
when looking back at his 20s, a decade marred by mental illness.
The memoir he wrote based on his experiences, Reasons to Stay Alive, became his breakthrough hit.
Though, for reasons we might get into later, there was a time he wished he'd never written it.