The Girl on the Train
by Paula Hawkins
Summary
Rachel Watson, thirty three, unemployed, and drinking heavily, rides the same commuter train every day, partly to hide her firing from the roommate she still lives with, and the train happens to pass the house she used to share with her ex husband Tom, who now lives there with his new wife Anna and their baby daughter. A few doors down, Rachel becomes fixated on a couple she watches from the window each morning, inventing names and a whole happy marriage for them; the woman is actually Megan Hipwell, who has worked as a nanny for Tom and Anna and is secretly seeing a therapist while having an affair. After a blackout drinking episode that Rachel cannot fully remember, Megan goes missing, and Rachel, desperate to matter to someone, inserts herself into the investigation, lying to both the police and Megan's husband about a friendship with Megan that never existed. When Megan's body turns up, and it emerges she was pregnant, Rachel starts recovering fragments of the night she blacked out, fragments that slowly reveal her own ex husband Tom has spent years deliberately distorting her memory of their marriage to make her doubt her own sanity. It becomes clear Tom had been having an affair with Megan and killed her once she threatened to expose it. In the climax, Rachel confronts Tom and stabs him with a corkscrew as he attacks her; Anna, having finally seen through her own husband as clearly as Rachel has, helps make sure he does not survive, and the two women tell the police it was self defense. The novel ends with Rachel, sober for the first time in years, finally trusted to know what actually happened to her.
Hawkins splits the narration between Rachel's blackout riddled, deliberately unreliable account and two other women's more stable perspectives, and the gaps in Rachel's memory function as the book's central suspense device rather than a stylistic trick; a reader spends much of the book unsure whether to trust her at all. Hawkins has pushed back on comparisons to Gone Girl, noting that Amy Dunne is a calculating manipulator while Rachel is, in her words, just a mess who cannot do anything right, and that distinction is exactly what makes Rachel's slow recovery of her own memory feel earned rather than clever.
Historical Context & Significance
The Girl on the Train won the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for Mystery and Thriller, a readers' vote, and its audiobook won the 2016 Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year. No major literary prize marked its publication. Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred review, warning that even astute readers would be caught off guard as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts, while Jean Hanff Korelitz, reviewing it for the New York Times, was more critical of how illogical and self destructive Rachel's choices sometimes seemed.
The novel debuted at number one on the New York Times fiction bestseller list and held that position for thirteen consecutive weeks, and in Britain it spent twenty weeks atop the hardback chart, a record for the longest run at number one. It has since sold roughly twenty three million copies in forty six languages. Tate Taylor's 2016 film, starring Emily Blunt and relocated from England to the United States, was followed by a 2021 Indian Netflix adaptation and a 2018 stage version that has continued touring since.