Book One · The Train Between Worlds
The Train Between Worlds
Lost on an endless train where realities blur, memories surface, and every choice reveals who you truly are.
Where the line begins — a complete story in itself
Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited
You wake on a train with no name, no past, and a ticket that reads Destination: Unknown.
One moment the windows show quiet countryside. The next, impossible dreamscapes where logic twists and reality comes apart. Every door opens on another mystery. Every passenger is keeping something back. And the train itself feels alive.
Then there is Lumi — appearing and vanishing like smoke, speaking in riddles, somehow knowing the path you forgot you were on. Your only ally in this shifting labyrinth, or the key to the truth you have been running from?
As the carriages warp time, feed on fear, and fight back against anyone who tries to reach the end of the track, you piece together the memory fragments that explain why part of you never wants to leave. The haunting liberation, when it comes, is not in remembering who you were. It is in deciding who you will become.
This is the novel that opens the line — the first sight of a train that would go on to carry Cora Marsh and Abel Quist through two more books.
What to expect
- Read it if you liked
- Piranesi, The Midnight Library, The Ten Thousand Doors of January
- Central question
- If you could not remember who you were, who would you choose to be?
- Tone
- Surreal and dreamlike, closest of the three to a waking dream. More unsettling than sad.
- Point of view
- Close and disorienting — you learn the train exactly as the narrator does.
- Content notes
- Memory loss, dissociation, psychological disorientation.
- Formats
- Kindle. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
- Reading order
- Book One, but fully standalone — no other book is required.
FAQ
Questions readers ask
Do you have to read The Train Between Worlds books in order?
No. All three novels share a world, a currency and a train, but not a plot. Each one is written to work as a complete first book, and none of them spoils the others. Reading in publication order gives you the world in the order it was invented; starting anywhere else costs you nothing.
What is The Train Between Worlds actually about?
A train nobody remembers boarding, with more carriages than anyone has counted. Passengers stay because leaving is expensive: every door aboard costs one true memory of the person you would go back for. Not a fact or a date — the kind of memory you can walk around inside. The series follows three people paying that fare for very different reasons.
Is The Train Between Worlds free on Kindle Unlimited?
Yes. All three novels are free to borrow with a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and each can also be bought outright on Kindle. The Memory Fare and The Forty-Year Passenger are available in paperback too.
What should I read after The Midnight Library?
It depends which part of it you loved. If it was the premise — a place outside life where you get to examine your choices — you want speculative fiction with a clean central rule. If it was the feeling, you want quiet, consoling novels about second chances. Those are two different shelves, and the read-alike lists usually confuse them.
What are liminal space books?
Fiction set in places built for passing through and then never left — corridors, waiting rooms, stairwells, transit that never arrives. The defining feature is not horror but suspension: the architecture is doing something the characters cannot explain, and the rules of the place matter more than the plot.
Are there novels set entirely on a train?
A few. Most “train books” are murder mysteries that use a carriage as a locked room for a few hundred pages, or travel memoirs about real railways. Novels where the train is the whole world — no destination, no getting off — are much rarer, and they behave very differently.
What is the best novel about dementia?
There is no single answer, because readers come to these books for opposite reasons — some want the illness rendered accurately from the inside, some want the caregiver's side, and some want a story that is about forgetting without being a medical narrative at all. The right book depends on which of those you need.
Which book is about a mother searching for her missing daughter?
The Memory Fare, Book Two. Cora Marsh has spent six years at a railway lost property office looking for anything of her daughter's. When she finally boards the train on purpose, she learns that every door she opens to search for June costs her one real memory of her — and she will never know which one she paid.