Anyone who has read it will tell you it is unputdownable. Even horror author Stephen King, said it “kept me up most of the night”.
No wonder. An atmosphere of dread and threat is established from the opening page.
Something is buried by the train tracks. Someone tries to speak, but their mouth is thick with blood. Magpies scream overheard. Then the shock of the humdrum; a train jolts and screeches along the track, picking up speed as it heads towards London. At the carriage window, a woman’s face. What does she see, can we trust her thoughts?
And so begins The Girl On the Train, the new literary sensation written by unknown author Paula Hawkins. Published only six months ago it has already been compared to Gone Girl, the 2013 mega-seller by Gillian Flynn which was turned into a Hollywood film starring Ben Affleck.
Both books are firmly entrenched in the female noir genre, featuring unhappy women who must negotiate a landscape of doom and violence, implied or otherwise. And like Gone Girl, The Girl On the Train also has an unreliable narrator at its centre; a woman who is flawed and unlikeable, fractured by her disastrous relationships with men.
In fact, Girl On the Train has three of them – alcoholic Rachel, glossy Megan and sexy Anna. Trying to figure out which of their narratives is the truthful one, is perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of this odd and gripping psychological thriller.
Sales have taken the number of those who have read it to more than two million. This puts even the sales of EL James and her Fifty Shades trilogy to shame. The film rights have been snapped up by DreamWorks, with a big-budget film already being planned.
So this is a huge hit. And from a newcomer like 42-year-old Hawkins, it is nothing short of sensational.
The former journalist, who grew up in Zimbabwe, but has lived in London for more than 25 years, had written a few chick lit novels under the name of Amy Silver. But this is her first book under her own name, inspired by when she started commuting into the capital when she moved to the UK.
In the Africa she knew, trains did not snake through the suburbs, allowing nosy commuters to peer into the homes and lives of others. The main protagonist in The Girl On the Train is Rachel; an alcoholic divorcee whose life seems to be in a tailspin. She travels to and from London every day, fantasising about the lives of the strangers who live in houses whose gardens back onto the railway tracks.
At first, they seem like the daydreams of a lonely woman. When she becomes obsessed with those lives, however, it becomes clear her connections to the street run deeper.
Her ex-husband lives in one of the houses with his new wife, Anna. A few doors down, we find Megan and her husband; a couple on whom Rachel projects all her longing for a happy marriage and true love.
But one morning everything starts to unravel when she sees something shocking from her train window and is drawn into a criminal investigation.
The success of The Girl On the Train shows the appetite readers have for these bleak novels. They tend to be written by females for female audiences.
Hawkins skilfully plaits the narrative between Rachel, Anna and Megan – women who are all deeply unhappy in different ways. And while each of their dilemmas raise questions about the dark side of marriage and emotional ties, the reader is comforted by a banquet of relationships that are even more cracked than their own.
Gone Girl told the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, New York hipsters who relocate to his Midwest hometown against the backdrop of the economic slump. On the surface, they are a dream couple. Underneath, each is not quite who they pretend to be, and their marriage is marinated in rage and spite.
In The Girl On the Train, marriage is also the core of the rotten apple, except here the author takes it onto the post-divorce stage. How far would you fall if your marriage collapsed? It’s a terrifying thought, a reminder to everyone how near the abyss even the most ordered lives can be. Hawkins does not flinch in her portrayal of Rachel as someone who vomits on the carpet and spends most of her nights drunk-dialling people on the phone.
In Gone Girl, Amy is the glamorous and calculating architect of her own story. By comparison, Rachel can barely remember what she did last night, and wakes up most mornings in a sweat of guilt and dread.
But the same compelling themes beat through both books like a death drum. How well do you know your friends, yourself, the woman you married, the man you want to be, the person you think you love?
It is the uncertainty and unknowingness of even the most humdrum relationships that exerts such a pull on lovers of domestic noir. The terrible love lives of people just like many of us are a truly haunting spectacle.
Daily Mail