FAQ

Questions about the series

Reading order, what the books are about, where to start, and how to read them free.

FAQ

Everything 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.

Learn more: how to pick your starting book

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.

Learn more about Book One

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.

Learn more on the Amazon series page

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.

Learn more: books like The Midnight Library

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.

Learn more: the best liminal space books

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.

Learn more: the best books set on a train

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.

Learn more: fiction books about dementia

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.

Learn more about The Memory Fare