A train goes off the rails in Paris, and we get vivid portraits of the people onboard

Boston Globe

13-03-2025

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'I loved setting myself a sort of discipline of trying to find as many real people as possible who were in France in the 1890s and saying, what if they were on my train, how might their day have gone?' Donoghue says. 'I didn't have to go to any great lengths to try and make the range of characters diverse — 1890s Paris was this international hub. It was just like a casting call of lively people. It was lovely to sort of pay homage to the city.'
Emma Donoghue will read at 5 p.m. on Monday, March 17, at
in South Hadley.
And now for some recommendations . . .
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Scarily relevant, Clay Risen's
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(Scribner) transports readers back to the witch hunts of the early 1950s. America had led the Allies to victory over the Nazis, but alongside postwar peace and prosperity the country grappled with paranoid conspiracies that saw enemies everywhere. Risen, a New York Times journalist, vividly recalls an era that may feel all-too-familiar.
In
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(Riverhead), his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah revisits his native Tanzania to tell the interlocking stories of three young people whose lives are on the brink of transformation. Another thoughtful and deeply moving book by a master storyteller.
Stephen Graham Jones has a growing fanbase that includes fellow writers like Tommy Orange and Stephen King. In
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(Simon & Schuster), his latest, Jones blends horror and history to tell the story of a vampire who walks the lands of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, seeking revenge for a massacre by whites that left 217 Blackfeet dead.
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(One World) by Nicole Cuffy is a gorgeously written literary excavation of belonging and belief. The novel toggles between the narrative of a bereaved young man who finds himself drawn into a community that may be a cult and the mysterious leader whose own history was indelibly marked by his time serving in the American military during the Vietnam War.
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section.
Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at