The Train
The Train
Author: Georges Simenon
Desc: Against all expectations Marcel Ferón has made a “normal” life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10 1940 as Nazi tanks approach this timid happy man must abandon his home and confront the “Fate” that he has secretly awaited. Separated from his pregnant wife and young daughter in the chaos of flight he joins a freight car of refugees hurtling southward ahead of the pursuing invaders. There he meets Anna a sad-looking dark- haired girl whose accent is “neither Belgian nor German ” and who “seemed foreign to everything around her.” As the mystery of Anna’s identity is gradually revealed Marcel leaps from the heights of an exhilarating freedom to the depths of a terrifying responsibility—one that will lead him to a blood-chilling decision. When it first appeared in English in 1964 British novelist and critic Brigid Brophy declared The Train to be “the novel his admirers had been expecting all along from Simenon.” Until The Train she wrote the dazzlingly prolific novelist had been “a master without a masterpiece.”