In 1895, a train in France is headed for disaster. Readers meet several of the passengers and workers on the train as it moves closer to Paris. Unfortunately, there were too many characters, and the necessary back stories included for each character were short but also took away from the immediacy of the story. The ending redeemed the book somewhat as the pace picked up, and I was truly left wondering how it would end.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review. This book was just okay to me. I loved the time period and was interested to read about the train crash. Donoghue writes beautifully, but there were just way too many characters, which really took away from the tension that should have been built in this story. The reader has to spend so much time parsing out which character is which that you almost lose track of the fact the train is going to crash.

So this book is about the 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station. I occasionally like to read something different and this one fit the bill. I had to look up this disaster before reading so there would be no surprises at the end. Obviously this is a character driven novel because you are just reading about people riding on a train. But there is also anticipation for when the disaster is going to happen. I would recommend looking up this train disaster because the picture that comes up is fascinating. The picture is included in the book. So it was fine. In a book with so many characters there are always ones you care more about than others. It is a quick read though.

5 stars

This brilliant, brilliant novel takes place all in one day’s travel on an express train from France’s northern coast to Paris in 1895 that ends in a crash in the main Parisian train terminal. All of this is based on a true incidence, but don’t google it in advance to spoil it for yourself!

The tension starts immediately: a young French anacharist with a bomb in her lunch bucket hopes to blow up the train with some key senior Parliament leaders on board in protest of the terrible conditions of the working poor. There’s intense social commentary into poor, middle, and upper class of society, with each class of the train accordingly divided between third to first class. Through passenger conversations with each, the people on the train come alive and capture a snapshot of the times. Fascinating caricatures emerge and the novel delivers deeply compelling historical insights that move along as fast as the countryside scenery outside the speeding train.

There’s also the train itself: running on new complex technology that can easily break down. Despite this, the train is understaffed, with the train’s conductor and engineer under huge bonus incentives to bring the train in on time or better yet early. Not only do we dive into the perspectives of the crew, but also the earnest personification of the train itself, caring deeply about its passengers. Insights into early days of coal burning trains actually proves fascinating. We see first-hand the new and rapidly evolving technology of the steam and coal train engines, in which so many things could go mechanically wrong. Added on top of this is a mandate from the train companies to move as fast as possible between station stops to keep the express trains arriving on time. As the story moves through all the train components that need to work together, the dangerous tension between speed and safety becomes omnipresent to the story.

By the time the train approaches Paris, we care deeply about the people aboard, hate the train company, and hope desperately for disaster to be averted.

When finished, go online to see the extraordinary photographs!

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

While I have enjoyed other Emma Donaghue novels, this one was just not for me. Based on a true events, The Paris Express takes the reader on a fictionalized account of the infamous train derailment that occurred in Paris in 1895. I had a hard time keep track of all the characters, even though they were well developed with an easy writing style. I hope other readers enjoy the twists and turns that this novel brings. Thank you NetGalley and Summit Books for the ARC!

At least we can resolve to leave the dirty world a little cleaner than we found it. from The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue

This novel picks up speed as it goes along, much like the train pulling out of the station that is the center of the novel.

We meet the passengers, ordinary people of all classes, a few whose talent and dedication may take them far. An unmarried pregnant woman. A young woman who is likely dying. The men who proudly run the train. Each with their private burdens and sorrows, each with their small joys.

She’s guarding her fury like a candle flame. from The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue

But one passenger has become radicalized and hopes to make her mark in a big way. She believes the individual is expendable in the battle for a just society. And the tension picks up and our fingers flip pages faster.

Inspired by an 1865 Paris train wreck, this work of historical fiction becomes a commentary on the value of human life and questions our proper response to an unjust society filled with classism, racism, and misogyny.

Characters are inspired by actual passengers on the train, and those who could have been on the train, offering an overview of Parish society at the time. We meet Henry Ossawa Tanner, a mixed race American artist; John Synge, playwright known for The Playboy of the Western World; Alice Guy who created some of the earliest films.A

At the end of the journey, I found the novel to be a profound read.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

This book intrigued me from the second I laid my eyes on it; I had never heard of this train crash; this is why I decided to read it, and I loved every word of it! The construction of the story was done extremely well. The story starts at 8:30 am in Granville where most passengers initially embark on the infamous train and ends at Paris-Montparnasse at 4 p.m.. The story is narrated in chronological order, and we are getting to meet the passengers. This allows us to feel an attachment by the time the accident occurs. What's even better is there was vast research made on Emma Donoghue's part because most of the characters where physically in the train that fatal day. The vast majority of those actors weren't fictional, and, to my biggest delight, a troubling picture of the crash is printed at the end of the book. I mean, what more can a reader ask for?? If you are interested in real-life occurrences within a Litfic novel, look no further. I really felt like I was travelling on the French countryside in the late 1800s those past two days. So fantastic!!!

I think I understand the author’s premise of taking a true incident and trying to weave a story around it. However, the book was boring, confusing and full of information that had no relevance to the story. I’ve read many fictionalized stories based on true life incidents that actually wove a great story. This was not one of them.

For the first third of the book before the author revealed Mado’s intention to blow up the train, I had no idea where the author was even going with the story or how these people’s individual stories had any relationship. There were way too many characters to keep up with. Normally by that point in the book, it would have been a DNF for me.

But I continued on, hoping it would somehow improve. It didn’t. And the author’s attempt to connect some of the people on the train just didn’t work. Many things added nothing to the story - such as the gay sex in the bathroom at one of the train stops. That was totally irrelevant and out of place.

The only interesting part of the book was the author’s note at the end, which gave the actual facts about the incident. I kept expecting the train to explode when it is unlikely there was even a bomb on the train. Those few pages told the tale that the author was unable to effectively tell in all the previous pages.

Courtesy of Summit Books and Netgalley, I received the ARC of The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue. This well researched historical novel recreates the interactions of the passengers on the ill fated 1895 train that was travelling from Normandy to the Montparnasse train station in Paris. I did think the narrative started slowly, getting all the passengers introduced, and identifying the political unrest and class distinctions in Paris then. Including the locomotive as a key character was creative, as was learning about the mechanics of train travel at the end of the nineteen century. As the journey progressed and the train gained speed, so did the direction of the story, and I was compelled to keep reading to the climax! Being unfamiliar with this part of history, I did appreciate the notes at the end of the book..

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.
This is a fantastic read describing the train ride to Paris where nothing is as it seems. One gets involved in the drama of the passengers from first class on down and the world was for men and women, French, American and other nationalities. Their lives are captured and spun out as they travel to Paris. The voyage via train is not without its own struggles and drama. Lust, love, ambition and anarchy all play out in the trip which really did occur. It was a fantastic read!

On October 22, 1895, an express train to Paris crashed into the station. Emma Donoghue's The Paris Express uses the incident as background to give readers slices of lives of the real and fictional passengers and crew members. Emma Donoghue is one of my favorite authors, and her writing is as wonderful as ever here. Even though with a large the casts, each were only afforded limited paragraphs, they were given distinct voices and vivid portrayals. The incident itself was not the main focus. The lives onboard that train were, to the point that the crash itself was almost anticlimactical.
I enjoyed the book in any case, and wish we could spend more time with the characters.

Can a novel be written about a train ride that precedes an extraordinary accident (killing only 1 person)? Yes and no. In 1895 a passenger train came into the Montparnasse Station in Paris way too fast. The crew was not able to stop the train and it ended up barreling through barriers, across a concourse, and ultimately through a wall on the second floor with the locomotive ending up plunged at a 45 degree angle on the street below. Miraculously, only 1 person was killed (a woman news-seller who was directly below the train).
Emma Donoghue has fashioned a novel of the train trip from Normandy that climaxed in the disaster. She uses real and imagined characters, including an anarchist intent on blowing the train up, a woman giving birth, a munitions manufacturer, 3 members of the French parliament, train engineers, and many others. What the book excels at is the author's understanding of French history and what French society looked like in 1895. Ultimately the interactions of the characters, or the lack of interactions had nothing to do with the accident. The only through-line is that in the end the train will crash. Nonetheless, by the end I was on good enough terms with the characters to enjoy the book and its afterword.

This historical novel, set in 1895 on a train bound for Paris, had potential but ultimately derailed due to its overwhelming cast of characters and lack of a coherent plot. With twenty-six named passengers and crew, the story quickly becomes a confusing jumble of introductions, with minimal backstory or development for most of them. The book’s unique structure—using time on the train instead of traditional chapter numbers—is interesting, but it does little to improve readability.

Mado, who appears to be the main character, is an unlikeable, rebellious figure carrying a bomb, though she ultimately chooses not to detonate it. Meanwhile, the train crew makes reckless decisions, leading to a crash. However, rather than building tension, the story meanders through character snippets, random deaths, and a late-in-the-game history lesson that feels tacked on.

While the setting and premise had promise, the novel lacks focus, making it tedious and frustrating to follow. The final author’s note—suggesting that some characters were real while others were merely “plausible guests”—only adds to the sense of aimlessness. Ultimately, this book felt pointless, monotonous, and overstuffed with characters who barely mattered.

This wasn't bad, but I did find it somewhat anticlimactic. The whole book takes place in one day, which you would think would make it fast paced, for such a short book it actually felt somewhat slow. There are a TON of characters--I counted 16 in the first three chapters alone--so to have each of them introduced and developed, that doesn't leave room for a whole lot more. I did enjoy how the train itself was a character (I'm not counting that among the 16), that was creative and done well.
*
I also liked learning a bit more about the problem anarchists were in France at that time, that's a point of history I don't know a lot about.
*
But the actual climax of the book was so quick, I kind of felt like "that was it?" when it was over. I don't know, it was an interesting microcosm of people in France in the late 1800s, but wasn't a favorite of mine.

The Paris Express is based on the events of an actual train crash that happened in Paris at the end of the 19th century. It retells the story from the viewpoints of many people, both real and fictional, during a day that ended in destruction.
I was eager to read this book because I loved Emma Donague's previous novel, The Pull of the Stars, and hoped that The Paris Express would be as good. It wasn't.
The main problem, for me, was that there were too many characters and I didn't feel that 288 pages was enough for me to engage with any of them. It seemed that as soon as I got involved with one, the scene shifted to another and by the time I got back to the one that interested me, I had forgotten who they were. Some of them (like the pregnant woman who appeared to exist solely for the purpose of adding drama by going into labor just before the crash) were just not that interesting. The more important characters, like the young anarchist who brought a bomb onto the train and a strange older woman who made her life as unpleasant as possible so she could help unfortunate strangers, were just off-putting, or, like the three railway employees, relatively indistinguishable to me (I had to keep going back and searching their names on my Kindle to help me recall who they were.) While reading The Paris Express, I kept thinking of how inferior it was to something like War and Peace, which included numerous characters with foreign names, but never lost my interest. Of course, I know it isn't fair to compare any writer to Tolstoy, but even Stephen King, in The Stand, did a much better job than Emma Donaghue did here,
The Pull of the Stars was so good because it focused on a half dozen characters presented by a single narrator. The Paris Express was too ambitious to be really engrossing. I found myself checking the location numbers to see how much more I had to read each time I picked it up.
Another problem for me was the sheer grossness of so much of this book. I have to be completely enthralled by a character before I will have any interest in details like the smell of their feet, their defecation, or the feel of the blood soaking their menstrual rags. I do not have any desire to read about people urinating and throwing their urine out of windows. Still less do I want to be forced to read about a totally random sexual encounter between a married politician and an unnamed railway worker in an alley outside the train.
Finally, while I would not argue that the injustices against women and minorities were ever anything but terrible, I don't read fiction to have my nose rubbed in a polemical stew. Caring about the issues is not enough if I don't care about the characters they affect.
I am grateful to NetGalley and S&S/Summit Books for the opportunity to read a free advance copy of The Paris Express in exchange for my honest opinion.

I found the most interesting and captivating part to be the Author's notes at the end! There were just too many characters; I only made a connection with Mado. It was a lot for me to keep track of, but I was still interested in the overall book. However, I would not necessarily recommend it.. it felt really slow at times, but the historical part of it was good..? I am still confused by this book.

I was very excited to read this book, and it was a good read but just not for me. I am someone who doesn't do well with a ton of detail and this book has that, it does make sense because all the details are there to make you care more for each of the people who are on this train. I did find some of the backstory for some of the characters unnecessary, the information didn't do anything that moved the story on or added anything to what the outcome was to be. There are a lot of characters to try and keep track of and some times I did find myself mixing them up.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue is a third person multi-POV historical about the Paris Montparnasse derailment in 1895. Multiple people and small groups board the train to Paris, unaware of what is going to occur later in the day or the plans of the other passengers. As they get closer and closer to their destination, the more chaotic the ride becomes.

I had not heard of the Montparnasse derailment before being sent the ARC. I don’t recall ever seeing the famous photo of the incident before doing a bit of research halfway through the novel either. I don’t think anyone needs to have a deep knowledge of the event or late 19th century French history to truly appreciate what is happening on the page. A lot of things are explained in enough detail that I was able to fill in or point out my own knowledge gaps for the most part. It’s a lot of tension between the characters as they speed towards something they were aware was a possibility but probably weren’t totally planning on.

The plot shifts between the many POVs throughout the chapters and we don’t tend to stay with a single character or small group for longer than five pages. Each chapter is a different moment in time and how all of these POVs are experiencing these moments and their inner lives. The POV I liked the most was the one that was from Engine 721’s POV, as it gave the most details about how trains were operating at the time. I also was curious about Mado’s POV after the book is over since she was radicalized into committing an act of terrorism before the book opened.

I wouldn’t really say this is plot or even character-driven; it’s very much event-driven in a way that I wouldn’t say is true for a lot of historicals I have read. Everything is centered around this derailment and we don’t spend enough time with any of the characters for it to be character-driven. But there’s not really a plot beyond the event. It’s different that a lot of what I currently see and I would like to see more books centered around a very specific point in time that utilizes multiple POVs that are discussing racism, sexism, Queerness, terrorism, and other attitudes of the time.

Content warning for mentions of racism and depictions of birth

I would recommend this to fans of historical fiction looking for a book with more than five POVs and readers who prefer a historical that discusses the attitudes of the time

This was a character study of strangers on a train, based on a real accident that happened in 1911. Although I appreciate the research the author did, the disaster does not really happen until the end of the book. I was hoping that the book would be more about the derailment, describing what happened to people post the situation, and investigation of what really happened. Thank you NetGalley for providing me an eARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a copy of The Paris Express in exchange for a honest review. The historical events that inspired this novel drew my interest and the storytelling had an Agatha Christie essence to it. However, I think the execution missed the mark somewhat for me. There were simply too many characters for the length of this particular book. Everything felt extremely surface level and read like a brief newspaper article, I wanted to connect with certain characters more than others, but felt the author was too afraid to deviate from the facts. This made the whole tale feel rather procedural in nature. I wish we got a longer narrative and got to know each character on a deeper level and it would have been a better read.