The Girl on the Train

by Paula Hawkins

Published 2015

Every morning, Rachel takes the same commuter train into London and watches through the window as it slows at the same suburban signal, where she glimpses a seemingly perfect couple in their back garden and spins quiet fantasies about their lives. Then one day the woman is gone. When Rachel sees something at the signal she should not have seen, and then learns the missing woman's name from the evening news, her blurred memories and heavy drinking turn her from a lonely commuter into an unreliable witness at the center of a police investigation. Paula Hawkins's 2015 debut thriller layers three women's points of view, each limited and compromised in a different way, to tell a story in which the lines between neighbors, exes, and strangers blur under the pressure of addiction, obsession, and marital violence. Tight, propulsive, and quietly devastating in its portrait of how a life can unravel in full view of everyone around it, The Girl on the Train became an international phenomenon and a leading example of the unreliable-narrator suspense novel.