Tag: Read

Blog Tour/Book Review: Train Man by Andrew Mulligan

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Train Man Blog Tour Poster

The book just arrived at What Cathy Read Next is Train Man by Andrew Mulligan, the service from Chatto & Windus via Random Things Tours.  This service is comprised of 320 pages.  After leaving What Cathy Read Next, this book will call at Cosy Books, Rachel Read It and NB Magazine where this blog tour terminates.

Train ManAbout the Book

Michael is a broken man. He’s waiting for the 09.46 to Gloucester, so as to reach Crewe for 11.22: the platforms are long at Crewe, and he can walk easily into the path of a high-speed train to London.

He’s planned it all: a net of tangerines (for when the refreshments trolley is cancelled), and a juice carton, full of neat whisky. To make identification swift, he has taped his last credit card to the inside of his shoe.

What Michael hasn’t factored in is a twelve-minute delay, which risks him missing his connection, and making new ones.

He longs to silence the voices in his own head: ex-girlfriends, colleagues, and the memories from his schooldays, decades old. They all torment him. What Michael needs is somebody to listen.

A last, lonely journey becomes a lesson in the power of human connection, proving that no matter how bad things seem, it’s never too late to get back on track. Journeys intersect. People find hope when and where they least expect it. A missed connection needn’t be a disaster: it could just save your life.

Format: Hardcover (320 pp.)    Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Published: 4th July 2019     Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Train Man on Goodreads

My Review

Many of us have probably had the experience of travelling by train and idly wondering about our fellow passengers: where are they going, what’s the purpose of their journey? We may also have had the experience of being drawn into polite, inconsequential conversations with fellow travellers or of watching passengers struggle with luggage, unpack and repack belongings, and so on. Michael’s journey, and those of the other characters in the book, is punctuated by just such encounters.

In Michael’s case they prompt him to construct elaborate and often farfetched stories about the people he meets; perhaps they might become friends or be present at momentous moments in each other’s lives. In fact, Michael’s thoughts often involve him creating fictional versions of his own life in which he is a much more successful, better version of himself. In reality he’s something of a loner who tends to be overly intolerant of petty bureaucracy and breaches of rules by others when his own life, arguably, is littered with more significant failings. This might make him a slightly irritating or unsympathetic character was it not for what the reader gradually learns about his traumatic past.

The sudden switches between Michael’s journey, his memories and the stories of the other characters do require a degree of alertness on the part of the reader. If you like, the same alertness required to control the trains arriving and departing at a busy railway junction.

Despite Michael’s careful planning of his intended journey, in the end it’s a decision taken on impulse that changes everything for him, and for the reader as well. What initially seemed a quite dark story takes on an altogether different hue.

Train Man is a thought-provoking story about chance encounters, missed opportunities, the kindness of strangers and why, sometimes, living in the moment is enough.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Chatto & Windus, and NetGalley.

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In three words: Emotional, acutely-observed, thought-provoking

Try something similar…Drift, Stumble, Fall by M. Jonathan Lee (read my review here)

Andrew Mulligan Author PicAbout the Author

Andrew Mulligan was born in 1962 and brought up in London. He worked as a theatre director for ten years before travels in Asia prompted him to retrain as a teacher. Having taught in India, Brazil, Vietnam and the Philippines he returned to the UK and now writes full time. He is best known as a children’s author; his novel Trash (2010) has been published in thirty-two languages. He also writes radio plays and film scripts. Train Man is his first adult novel: ‘What was the starting point? I’m afraid it was when a colleague did the unthinkable, and all I could think about was what might have saved him.’

Connect with Andrew

Website  ǀ  Goodreads

6 Degrees of Separation: From Where The Wild Things Are to The Great Darkness

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It’s the first Saturday of the month so it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees

This month’s starting book is Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. It’s a book I haven’t read but I know it’s a much-loved classic about a little boy called Max who puts on a wolf suit and has a series of imagined adventures.

It made me think of another children’s book that features wolves, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. As well as being a prolific author of books for children, Joan Aiken also wrote The Haunting of Lamb House, a ghostly re-imagining of events in the house in the Kent village of Rye where Henry James lived for a time. It was also there that he wrote The Turn of the Screw.

The 1961 film version of The Turn of the Screw, released under the title The Innocents, starred Deborah Kerr as the governess to two children who becomes convinced the house and grounds are haunted. Deborah Kerr also starred in the 1955 film adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. Set during and shortly after the Second World War, it tells of the affair between a man and his friend’s wife.

Also set partly during the Second World War is Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, Warlight, which was shortlisted for this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction (although it lost out to The Long Take by Robin Robertson). The ‘warlight’ of the title refers to the years when blackouts and curfews were in effect. This takes me to my final link – The Great Darkness by Jim Kelly. It’s a historical crime mystery set in Cambridge in the opening weeks of the Second World War, when the first blackout – the great darkness of the title – covers southern England.

So for this month’s Six Degrees we’ve travelled from dreams of wild things to very real dangers under cover of darkness.

Excitingly, next month (3rd August 2019), is a wild card – start with the book you’ve ended this month’s chain with (or for those playing for the first time, start with the last book you finished reading).