(This review comes to us on the day of the Author, Paula Hawkins’s 43rd birthday)
From #MyCoffeeChats
Rachel takes the train at 8:04 am and in the evening at 17:50 pm. One fine day, she happens to catch a glimpse of something very unpredictable which comes across as quite shocking to her-- something she was not supposed to witness. That incident changes everything.
This is a two-year time machine, woven into the lives of 3 women caught between, love, lust, loneliness, temptation. It speaks of imagination versus harsh reality, sobriety versus under-influence and THE dark murder (or multiple murders?) that binds them and the men in their lives together.
I enjoyed the demystification of the story by the protagonist who is an alcoholic cum a super detective unravelling the clues.
Hamro Kitab: For the book-loving society
The mystery is amazing and if you happen to be the kind who falls into the likes of the contemporary reality of characters juggling between job, family, social life and often wonders about the twist and turns of another fiction like Gone Girl— then I tell you, you will definitely enjoy this train journey.
When I was reading the book, at times, I got caught into this thought process of ‘how we look into the lives of strangers and weave stories and what if it actually comes true’.
In a way the story also scared me because Rachel had built a story of Jess and Justine by travelling in the same 8:04 am – 17:50 pm commuter train, which she took for 6 months. In course of reading, I felt there was not a shred of fiction but realism attached to it. I appreciate how the writer has ‘created’ mind games within her characters.
At some points, one feels like a time traveller flipping through the lives of these characters and once the story picks up, it is absolutely intriguing— kind of a holiday treat and a break from the heavy reading.
Published in January 2015, the book is still in The New York Times, Best Seller Hardcover fiction list (August 21, 2015). In Amazon reads it still tops the UK eBook sales till date (August 25, 2015).
Paula Hawkins’ shines as a debut thriller writer I would say. The manner in which she describes the lives of the characters definitely exhibits her journalistic skills. The psychological profiling of each character grabbed my attention till the end. There is this margin of sequel-feeling in the end but as a reader, I hope the story ends right there, and that we get to read more thrillers from Paula Hawkins with a new story line.
