The Girl on the Train
Rachel takes the same commuter train to London every morning, even though she no longer has the job she is pretending to go to, and every morning it stops at the same signal outside a row of terraced houses she used to know. From the window she watches a young couple she has never met eat breakfast on their patio and quietly builds a fantasy about their perfect marriage. When the woman she has been watching disappears and turns up on the news, Rachel realizes she may have seen something the night she vanished, or she may not. She is a blackout drunk, her memory is untrustworthy, and her ex-husband's new wife has every reason to want her kept quiet. Paula Hawkins's novel is a tight, claustrophobic thriller about three women and the stories they are not telling themselves.
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What you might want to know about The Girl on the Train
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Divorced and drinking too much, Rachel Watson rides the same London commuter train every morning past the back garden of a couple she has invented an entire life for. When the wife disappears, Rachel believes she saw something the night before.
Yes. A 2016 film adaptation directed by Tate Taylor and starring Emily Blunt was released. The film moves the setting from London to New York. A 2021 Indian-Hindi-language adaptation also exists.
Yes. The Girl on the Train is widely paired with Gone Girl in conversations about the early-2010s wave of unreliable-narrator domestic thrillers. Both became massive bestsellers and major films.
The Girl on the Train was written by Paula Hawkins, published in 2015 by Seal Books.
The Girl on the Train is 360 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Girl on the Train takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Girl on the Train is a standalone novel by Paula Hawkins, not part of a series.
The Girl on the Train is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.