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History France

The Paris Express

A Novel

by (author) Emma Donoghue

Publisher
HarperCollins Canada
Initial publish date
Mar 2025
Category
France, Historical, Literary
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781443474245
    Publish Date
    Mar 2025
    List Price
    $16.99
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781443474238
    Publish Date
    Mar 2025
    List Price
    $34.99

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Description

From Emma Donoghue, author of Room, The Wonder and Pull of the Stars comes a taut and suspenseful historical novel that reimagines an 1895 French railway disaster, an event famously documented in dramatic photographs

Set over a single day, as the morning train travels from the Normandy coast to Paris, men, women and children take their seats in the passenger cars, which are divided by wealth and status. Among the passengers is an anarchist intent on destruction, a young boy travelling alone, a pregnant woman fleeing her home village for the anonymity of the big city, a medical student who suspects a girl may have a fatal disease, and the railway men, devoted to the train, to the company and to each other.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a thrilling ride and a literary masterpiece that captures the politics, fears and chaos of the end of the nineteenth century.

About the author

EMMA DONOGHUE was born in Dublin and lived in England for many years before moving to Canada. She writes in many genres, including theatre, radio drama and literary history, but is best known for her fiction, both historical (SlammerkinThe Sealed LetterAstrayFrog Music) and contemporary (Stir-FryHoodLandingTouchy Subjects). Her seventh novel, Room, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean region) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. It sold more than two million copies. Donoghue scripted the film adaptation, a Canadian-Irish film by Lenny Abrahamson starring Brie Larson, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. And her most recent novel, The Wonder, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2016.

Emma Donoghue's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"Clever, ambitious, and richly researched. A slice of 1890s Paris that makes us see that our modern problems aren’t so modern after all! The Paris Express is a smartly structured novel that ratchets up the pace until it's hurtling along as fast as the doomed train itself." — Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam

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