
The Girl on the Train
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– Unabridged
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Brought to you by Penguin.
Winner of the 2016 Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year.
Includes an exclusive extract from Paula Hawkins' scorching new thriller A Slow Fire Burning, read by Rosamund Pike.
Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She’s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. ‘Jess and Jason’, she calls them. Their life - as she sees it - is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy.
And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough.
Now everything’s changed. Now Rachel has a chance to become a part of the lives she’s only watched from afar.
Now they’ll see; she’s much more than just the girl on the train....
- Listening Length11 hours and 4 minutes
- Audible release date15 Jan. 2015
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB00S292VJ4
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
Listening Length | 11 hours and 4 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Paula Hawkins |
Narrator | Louise Brealey, India Fisher, Clare Corbett |
Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
Audible.co.uk Release Date | 15 January 2015 |
Publisher | Penguin Audio |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B00S292VJ4 |
Best Sellers Rank | 1,173 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) 6 in Urban Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) 19 in Women Sleuth Mysteries 37 in Psychological Thrillers (Audible Books & Originals) |
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 June 2020
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How it got made into a film I'll never know. Poor characters and a weak ending. At one stage it felt like the book would never end.
Personally I would recommend not to waste your time with this. But it appears I am in the minority and a lot harder to please than the thousands that gave it a good review.
There’s only so much I can or will say, because I believe this book is best savoured ‘cold’ and unspoiled. We meet our narrator, Rachel, on her train commute to and from London. On most days a red signal halts the train next to a line of townhouses whose gardens run down to the track, and Rachel has become accustomed to watching the young couple who live in the nearest house. She grows fond of them; gives them names – Jess and Jason; invents histories for them, and savours their evident happiness. In their contented companionship they seem to encapsulate everything that Rachel herself has failed to achieve, lost in a haze of of a failed marriage and alcoholism – all the more so because they live just a few doors down from the house she herself lived in with her ex-husband. Jess and Jason become totemic figures to her, a reassuring sign that love can and does really exist in the world. But then, one Friday morning, Rachel sees Jess out in her garden with another man – a stranger. A kiss is exchanged. Shocked at this ugly turn of events, and moved to protect the wronged Jason, Rachel decides to intervene. But she is too late.
The reason this book keeps you reading, compulsively, greedily, is because you have three narrative strands, each of them gradually adding more pieces to the jigsaw, each of them converging slowly but surely on that moment when everything will make sense. Our three narrators are not necessarily liars, but they’re unreliable: they tell us only part of the story, or they forget; they’re driven by obsession, or they remember things mistakenly. And, as the story deepens, we come to realise that everyone has their own demons and that one’s fantasies of the perfect couple one spots from the train, in the midst of one’s own dull, unexciting life, are only that – a fantasy – perhaps darker and more dangerous than one could ever imagine.
And another thing about this book – it lingers. I feel positively tainted by its unsettling story – somehow dirty, uneasy, guilty. It’s a very strong piece of work, fast-paced and threatening, and I suggest you read it now, if you haven’t already.
For the full review, please see my blog.
One of the challenges of a story like this is whether to believe any of the multiple first person narrators. Rachel, the eponymous girl on the train, is an alcoholic who forgets bits of her life. Important bits too. The other narrators don't always tell the truth either. This may be a stylistic device but, ultimately, I want to care about characters in books, and I didn't really give a fig about what happened to any of them. The corkscrew in the neck is daft as well. It might hurt but you'd have to twist it as if pulling the cork from a nice chablis to go deep enough to cause death and most people won't behave like a bottle of wine. I can see the irony of a story involving an alcoholic finishing with a coup de corkscrew but it doesn't convince.
OK if you want to while away a few hours on a warm beach somewhere.
The novel moves backwards and forwards through time, telling the stories of three women, each in the first person, and this gives the narrative an intimacy and directness, which it might not have, if it were told in the third person.
The main protagonist, Rachel, sits on a train, watching the activities in the houses along the track, in particular, the road where she once lived happily with her husband.
As a writer, I could imagine the author sitting on that train, observing and writing what she saw, until suddenly the plot came to her.
In a voyeuristic fashion, Rachel focuses on a particular house where an apparently loving couple seem to live the sort of life that she once lived, before breaking up with her husband, and she fantasises about this other husband, and feels outrage, when it seems his trust has been broken. So far, any story is mainly in her head, but then the wife disappears, and Rachel gets involved in her disappearance.
The novel then moves back a year so that the wife - Megan - can describe her life and what happens to cause her disappearance, and eventually, half way through the book, jumping forward to the present again, Anna appears, Anna being the ‘other woman’ who is now married to Rachel’s ex-husband, Tom. The three narratives are woven together like a plait, as gradually the story takes shape, and eventually, the truth emerges.
The women’s names are all rather similar, all two syllables, and I wondered if this was deliberate, because in some respects, though on the surface apparently different, they are alike in some respects. None of them are very likeable, although once you are inside someone’s head, you can’t help having some empathy with them.
From a readability point of view, this really drew me in, but not only are the women rather unpleasant, or dysfunctional, the men aren’t very nice, either. So from that point of view, I can’t quite give it full marks, because I like to like the characters I’m spending my time with. So 9 out of 10, but probably 5 stars, here, just the same.