The Girl on the Train (Paperback)

Rachel Watson; drink-addled, unemployed, heartbroken. Her daily, soulless commute from suburbia to Euston only heightens the agony, the journey repetitively taking her past the scene of her old life, a life now occupied by another woman. In her pain, Rachel builds a fantasy, but when that fantasy is shattered by her witness to something no-one should ever see, everything she knows has to change and no longer will she just be The Girl on the Train.

In hardback, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train was the undoubted Waterstones smash-hit of 2015, emerging from the pack of Gone Girl-esque ‘amnesia thrillers’ as a remarkable success in its own right.

Released now as a tie-in paperback to Tate Taylor’s film adaptation, we invite you to experience the chilling, fractured world of Rachel Watson, her scarily fumbling attempts at amateur detection (a ‘Watson lacking a Holmes’, as the Financial Times so succinctly put it) only succeeding in dragging her into the mire of suspicion.

With no sense at all of an absolute truth – Rachel, and everyone she encounters, prove to be dizzyingly unreliable narrators – The Girl on the Train is a novel of mounting dread and unease, brilliantly voiced by previous-financial journalist Paula Hawkins in her breakout thriller triumph. And for those who choose to read this on their early morning train, just who is that person, sitting opposite you?