The Girl on the Train
The Girl on the Train
She watches the same couple from her train window every day. Then one of them goes missing.
What She Thinks She Saw
Paula Hawkins's 2015 thriller follows Rachel Watson, an alcoholic who rides the commuter train daily, observing a couple she has named from her window and building stories about their seemingly perfect life. When the woman she watches vanishes, Rachel becomes a witness, a suspect, and an unreliable guide through a mystery of memory, manipulation, and the violence hidden inside ordinary domestic arrangements. Three women narrate chapters and none of them knows the full truth.
Reading The Girl on the Train
Suspicion
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Chapter
"I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.
"Paula Hawkins · The Girl on the Train
Hawkins wrote The Girl on the Train after years as a financial journalist, drawing on her interest in unreliable perspectives and the way domestic spaces conceal private violence. She wrote it in eighteen months.
The novel sold over 23 million copies and spent 20 weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The 2016 film starred Emily Blunt and relocated the action from London to New York.