The Girl on the Train

by Paula Hawkins

Hardcover, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

823.92

Collection

Publication

Riverhead Books (2015), 336 pages

Description

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She's even started to feel like she knows them. "Jess and Jason," she calls them. Their life -- as she sees it -- is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

Media reviews

"...a building, inescapable tension that Hawkins handles superbly, nibbling away at Rachel’s memories until we, like our sardonic, bitterly honest narrator, aren’t really sure we want to know what happened at all."
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“The Girl on the Train” has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since “Gone Girl,” the book still entrenched on best-seller lists two and a half years after publication because nothing better has come along. “The Girl on the Train” has “Gone Girl”-type fun with
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unreliable spouses, too. Its author, Paula Hawkins, isn’t as clever or swift as Gillian Flynn, the author of “Gone Girl,” but she’s no slouch when it comes to trickery or malice. So “The Girl on the Train” is liable to draw a large, bedazzled readership too
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Readers sometimes conflate the “likability” of characters with a compulsion to care about their fate, but with a protagonist so determined to behave illogically, self-destructively and frankly narcissistically (someone even refers to her as “Nancy Drew”), it’s tough to root for Rachel.
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She’s like the clueless heroine of a slasher film who opts to enter the decrepit, boarded-up house where all her friends have been murdered because she hears a mysterious sound through an upstairs window
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Language

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