Sofa Spotlight - The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

I was given this as a Christmas present and I was fairly intrigued because I’ve heard so much hype about it. It’s been on posters and then there was the film so I thought this would be a good time to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s one of those books that has got a lot of twists. It has you looking in one direction and then you realise you’re looking completely the wrong way. Sometimes I like that kind of thing, but I don’t massively like unreliable narrators.

So the story is told by three narrators, Rachel, Anna and Megan. They are all connected in some way. Anna married to Rachel’s ex-husband Tom, and Megan lives a few doors down from Tom and Anna. Rachel can see into the lives of Megan her husband Scott when she travels into London on the train each day.

Then Megan goes missing and Rachel thinks that her viewpoint from the train might be helpful for the investigation. And that’s when everything starts to unravel.

Part of the reason I didn’t like it more is that I don’t like books where there isn’t at least one character that I can hold onto as sane and reliable. This book didn’t have that and I find characters who are spiralling down quite stressful, hence my need for a sensible character to cling on to.

It is gripping and I got through it very quickly, mainly because I wanted to know what had happened. I had pretty much worked it out before it ended though, although there was one twist I didn’t see coming. EG read it after me and worked it all out by about half way through so I suppose you might be entirely different.

What was nice was knowing a few people who were reading it at roughly the same time. Interestingly none of them liked it. I even had to just tell one of them how it ended so as to put him out of his misery.

If, like me, you missed out on this when the hype was big then I would say have a read and see what you think. It’s been a bestseller so maybe all those people are right.