The Girl on the Train: A Novel

Divorced and wretched Rachel can’t let go of her married life and gets caught up in the disappearance and murder of a former neighbor. Fired from her PR job, she commutes to London on the train each day, pretending to the world – and to her friend who has taken her in out of kindness – that she still has work. Rachel has only booze for comfort, staggering and slurring her way into other people’s lives, but getting to the heart of the truth and lies of those lives. The final truth is that her happy, married life was anything but. Suspicion falls on husbands, lovers, strangers on the train and Rachel herself. The style is structured in short, snappy sentences, told in the form of a diary of each of the main characters, uncluttered by flowery prose or rambling digressions. The narrative burrows into the psyche and turmoil beneath the placid suburban exterior of the characters and blank windows that the train passes, to the point that the reader has the urge to shout to Rachel to stop being so hopeless. Grim angst is the thread throughout, in the same type of approach as Maeve Binchy/Muriel Spark, where women confront illusions of marriage and motherhood, compounded by the reality of murder. Hawkins has tapped into a much-discussed vein of modern life, particularly the cramped suburbia of London, which could easily be applied to cities such as New York.