Setting guide
The Best Books Set on a Train
This search hides three different readers, and the lists that rank for it serve all three the same seven books. Decide which reader you are, then read the tier built for you. Every entry says how much of the book is really on the train, because half of the usual picks are not.
Book Two · The Train Between Worlds
The Memory Fare
A novel of a mother, a missing daughter, and the train that charges in memories.
This is the book on this site that belongs in the third tier, and the reason the tier is on the page. Cora Marsh has signed the visitor book at the lost property office at Ashwick Central every morning for six years, looking for something of her daughter’s. Then a bag comes in tagged in June’s handwriting, logged off the 11:47, a service that does not exist; the station has an 11:41 and an 11:53. Cora goes to Platform Four and boards it on purpose, which nobody has done before. The train has more carriages than anyone has counted and no destination anyone has seen. Every door she opens costs her one true memory of June, and she will not feel it go.
Be clear about what it is not. There is no murder, no detective, no snowdrift, and the conductor never lies; if you wanted Christie, the first tier is where to go. There is no society aboard in Snowpiercer’s sense, no engine to fight for and no class war; there is one woman, a lot of doors, and a small number of people who have been aboard long enough to have stopped searching. The closest cousin on this page for the feeling is Compartment No. 6, one person in one enclosed space for a very long time, crossed with Snowpiercer’s rule that the train is all there is. It is about 24,000 words, a long evening, and it is the saddest of the three books in the series.
A standalone novel — no need to have read Book One
Short answer
If you want a body in a locked carriage, read Murder on the Orient Express, then Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect for the modern version and Bullet Train for the one where everybody is the murderer. If you want the journey itself, strangers in a compartment and a life suspended between stations, read Compartment No. 6 first, then Simenon’s The Train and Greene’s Stamboul Train. If you want a train that is the whole world, with no station at either end, there are almost no books: Snowpiercer is the one, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands is the newest, and the series on this site was written because the shelf was empty. The Girl on the Train and Night Train to Lisbon are on every other list; below is why neither is set on a train.
What to expect from The Memory Fare
How it sits against the books above, honestly:
- Which tier
- The third. The train is the whole setting from chapter two to the last chapter, and there is no destination.
- Same as the locked-room books
- A fixed space, a fixed cast, and a question that cannot be answered from outside it. That is all; nobody is murdered and nothing is solved.
- Same as the journey books
- One person in transit, changed by it. Like Simenon’s Marcel and Liksom’s student, Cora is not the same at the end, and the train is why.
- Same as Snowpiercer
- The train is all there is. Nobody has seen the engine; nobody has counted the cars.
- Different from all of them
- The fare. Every door costs one true memory of the person you would go back for, and you never feel it go. The book is the arithmetic of that.
- Content notes
- A missing child, parental grief, prolonged searching, memory loss by choice. No on-page violence.
- Reading order
- Book Two, written to be read first. The rule of the fare is explained in its first chapters; Book Three opens the minute after it ends.
- Formats
- Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
Start here: which train are you looking for?
Three readers type this query. They want different books, and only one of them wants Agatha Christie.
I want the carriage as a locked room: a confined cast, a body, and nobody could have got on or off.
This is the biggest group and the easiest to serve. Murder on the Orient Express built the form and still does it best. Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is the same form rebuilt in 2024 with the narrator explaining the rules as he breaks them. Bullet Train puts six killers on a Shinkansen and lets them find each other. Strangers on a Train is here with a warning: the train is one chapter, and it is the best chapter.
Murder on the Orient Express · Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect · Bullet Train · Strangers on a Train
I want the journey: the compartment, the window, strangers who would never have met, a life on hold between two stations.
The literary tier, and the one the lists serve worst. Compartment No. 6 is two people and one berth from Moscow to Ulan Bator. The Train is Simenon’s refugee cattle-car in May 1940 and the best novel on this page. Stamboul Train is Greene’s Orient Express with no murder and more cruelty. Changing Track is a man deciding, over one Paris–Rome journey, not to leave his wife. The Paris Express is a real train with a real crash at the end. The Great Railway Bazaar is the non-fiction.
Compartment No. 6 · The Train · Stamboul Train · Changing Track · The Paris Express · The Great Railway Bazaar
I want the train to be the world: no destination that matters, the carriages as a whole society or a whole life.
The rarest kind and the one almost nobody writes, because the usual engine of a train story (we arrive, and then something happens) has been removed. Snowpiercer is the founding text: 1,001 cars circling a frozen earth. The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands is a sealed train that has to become a society for fifteen days. The series on this site is the third entry, and the fit note at the bottom is honest about how it compares.
Snowpiercer · The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands
What “set on a train” hides, and what the lists get wrong
Search this and the top results are the same seven titles in a different order, with two things wrong. The first is that they mix books set on a train with books that have a train in them. The Girl on the Train is set in houses; the train is a window she looks out of. Night Train to Lisbon spends one chapter on the night train and four hundred pages in Lisbon. Train Dreams is about a man who builds railroads and has no scene of consequence aboard one. Two of the four pages that rank were written by novelists to promote their own train book, which is fine, but it means the lists are shaped by what those two authors were reading.
The second thing is that nobody separates the readers. A train is a closed world that keeps moving, which is why crime writers love it: the cast is fixed, the exits are timetabled, and the snow can always stop it. But that same property makes it the best setting in fiction for a different thing, the suspended life: a man on the Paris–Rome express who has twenty hours to decide whether to leave his wife, a Finnish student sharing a berth with a drunk for four thousand miles. And a third, much smaller group of writers has noticed that if you remove the destination, the train stops being a vehicle and becomes a place, and then a society, and then a way of asking what people do when there is nowhere to arrive. Every book below is tiered by which of those three it is, and the table further down gives the number the lists never give: how much of the book is actually aboard.
“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”
The locked carriage: four mysteries that use the train as a room
The form has one rule: the train must be the reason the puzzle works. Christie made it a snowdrift. The three that follow her each found another way to lock the door. Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins (1936, the source of The Lady Vanishes) belongs here too and is cut only for space.
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Murder on the Orient Express
Closest match The locked roomThe one everyone means, and the one that still works. Poirot boards the Simplon Orient Express at Istanbul; an American called Ratchett is found stabbed twelve times in a locked compartment; the train is stuck in a snowdrift between Vinkovci and Brod. Nobody has left, so the murderer is aboard, and the whole novel is a corridor of doors with a fixed cast behind them. Christie had ridden the real train in 1928, alone, and taken notes on the carriage down to which way the door handles turned; the notes became clues, and enthusiasts have since gone and checked them.
What makes it more than a puzzle is the backstory, borrowed from the Lindbergh kidnapping two years before publication and still unsolved when the book appeared: a child taken, a ransom paid, a family destroyed. The solution is famous now, but the ending is less discussed and it is the point. Poirot offers two explanations and lets the railway company choose which to report. A locked room with a moral exit. Every book in this tier is trying to find one of its own.
“The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.” Poirot, Part Three
- How it ends
- Poirot lays out two solutions and lets the people in the dining car choose; the train goes on to Brod with the one they picked.
- Contains
- A child’s kidnapping and death in the backstory, recounted rather than shown
- Skip if
- Skip it if you already know the solution and want the mechanism to surprise you; read Stevenson instead, who knows you know.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, the 1929 snowbound train, the Lindbergh source, agathachristie.com: Christie’s 1928 journey and the door-handle notes
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Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect
Strong match The locked room, self-awareThe Ghan runs from Darwin to Adelaide through the middle of Australia, and Stevenson puts a crime-writers’ festival on it: a forensic pathologist turned novelist, a bestselling Scot with a detective series, a thriller writer, a debut author, and Ernest Cunningham, who solved his family’s murders in the previous book and has been asked to headline because of it. Then a writer dies. Ernest narrates in the voice of a man who has read all the golden-age rules and intends to obey them, and tells you on which page the killer will first appear.
It is a pastiche, and Kirkus was right that “it’s not for everyone”; if you find the fair-play commentary arch, it will wear on you by Alice Springs. But it is also the only recent locked-carriage mystery that understands why the train matters: the festival cannot get off, the outback gives them nowhere to go if they could, and the denouement, delivered in the bar car, is heckled by professionals. Read it after Christie, not instead.
- How it ends
- It ends in Adelaide, with a Christie-style gathering that the other writers interrupt and Ernest finishes anyway.
- Contains
- Murder, not graphic; Addiction and a dead child in a subplot
- Skip if
- Skip it if a narrator who explains the rules of the genre while breaking them sounds like a lecture rather than a game.
Checked against: Kirkus review (starred), BookBrowse: summary and review round-up
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Bullet Train
Strong match The locked room, invertedChristie has one murderer among the innocent; Isaka has no innocent at all. A Tōhoku Shinkansen leaves Tokyo for Morioka carrying an ex-hitman who has come to kill the teenage boy who put his son in a coma; two professionals called Tangerine and Lemon escorting a suitcase of money and a gangster’s son who is already dead; a man called Ladybug, sent to steal the suitcase, who believes himself the unluckiest assassin alive; and a teenager, the Prince, who is the scariest person on the train and knows it. The stops are the structure. Every station is a chance to get off and nobody manages it.
It was published in Japan in 2010, in English in 2021, and turned into a film that is louder and dumber than the book. Kirkus starred the translation for its “breakneck pacing, masterful character development, and well-timed comic relief”, and all three are real; Lemon judges people by whether they resemble characters from Thomas the Tank Engine, and it is not a joke, it is his ethics. This is the locked-room form with the detective removed and the question changed from who did it to who gets to Morioka.
- How it ends
- The train reaches Morioka; Ladybug’s luck turns at the last station and the Prince’s does not.
- Contains
- Violence throughout, comic in tone; A child in a coma; A teenage villain whose cruelty is the subject
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want a detective; there is none, and the passengers are the only law aboard.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication history, plot, reception, Crime Fiction Lover review, Book Marks: review round-up including the Kirkus star
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Strangers on a Train
Looser match One carriage, then the consequencesOn every list, and on this one with a caveat the others do not give: the train is the first chapter. Guy Haines, an architect going to Texas to ask his wife for a divorce, is cornered in the club car by a drunk rich boy called Bruno, who proposes that they swap murders: he will kill Guy’s wife, Guy will kill Bruno’s father, and since neither has a motive for the other’s crime neither will be caught. Guy laughs it off and gets off. Bruno does not laugh it off. The remaining two hundred and thirty pages happen in houses, hotels and Guy’s head.
So why is it here? Because the carriage scene is the purest example in fiction of what a train does to conversation: the specific intimacy of telling a stranger something because you will never see him again, and the specific horror of finding you were wrong. Hitchcock’s film keeps the scene and loses the book. In the novel Guy does the second murder. Highsmith’s subject is that he was always going to, and the train was just where he found out.
- How it ends
- Guy commits the murder the film spares him, and gives himself up; Bruno does not live to see it.
- Contains
- Two murders, one shown; Alcoholism; Obsessive pursuit of one man by another
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want to stay aboard; after chapter one you never see a train again.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, the novel’s ending, Literary Ladies Guide: 1950 reception
The journey: six books where the train is the whole point
No murder, or not the kind that gets solved. These are about the state of being in transit: a life suspended between two stations and what people become while it is. Two of them are the best novels on this page and appear on no other list.
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Compartment No. 6
Closest match Two people, one berthA Finnish student, never named, boards the Trans-Siberian in Moscow in the last years of the Soviet Union, going to Ulan Bator on a trip she once planned with her boyfriend, who is now in an institution. She chooses an empty compartment. Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, ex-soldier, builder, drunk, takes the other berth, and for four thousand miles he talks: about women, about knives, about Russia, about what he would do to her. She looks out of the window. Liksom writes the landscape as a litany, town after town of “squalid carcasses” of prefab housing, and the compartment as a cell with one very loud cellmate.
It won the Finlandia Prize, came into English in 2016, and was filmed in 2021 with the girl made older and the man made kinder; the novel is harder than the film. Kirkus called it “an unsettling, politically charged parable about the proletariat’s Soviet Union on the eve of dissolution”. It is also the truest book here about what a long train does to two people who did not choose each other: not friendship, exactly, but something that has to be called a bond because nothing else fits. If you want the journey and nothing but the journey, start here.
“How many times have I cursed this country, but where would I be without it? I love this country.” Vadim, near the end
- How it ends
- The train reaches Ulan Bator, and the last pages, which are not on it, are the strangest in the book.
- Contains
- Constant sexual talk and threat from Vadim; Heavy drinking; A suicide attempt in the girl’s past
- Skip if
- Skip it if you need the man in the other berth to be redeemed; Liksom lets him be exactly what he is.
Checked against: Kirkus review, Washington Independent Review of Books (Holly Smith)
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The Train
Closest match A life suspendedMay 1940. Marcel Féron mends radios in Fumay, on the Belgian border, and when the Germans come he puts his pregnant wife and small daughter on a refugee train and gets into a cattle truck further back with the men. In the night the train is split. His family goes one way; his half goes another, is strafed, sits in sidings for days, and is nobody’s responsibility. In the truck is a dark, silent woman called Anna, whose accent is neither Belgian nor German, and who has a husband who was taken two years ago. They become lovers on the straw. Marcel is happier than he has ever been, and he says so, and Simenon lets him.
This is the best novel on the page and it appears on none of the lists. The train is not a vehicle to anywhere; it is a suspension of everything, a place where a small careful man is briefly nobody’s husband. Brigid Brophy said in 1964 that it was “the novel his admirers had been expecting all along from Simenon”. It is a hundred and forty pages, and the last chapter, set three years later in a police station, is one of the worst things a decent man does in fiction, told in a voice that knows it.
- How it ends
- The train reaches La Rochelle and the family is found; the last chapter, years later, is a silent gesture in a police station that you will not forgive.
- Contains
- Deaths from strafing; Sexual frankness; A Jewish woman abandoned to the occupation
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want the journey to redeem someone; it shows Marcel exactly what he could be and then he goes home.
Checked against: Goodreads: Melville House edition, plot, Culture Court essay on the novel, Antenna Reviews on Le Train
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Stamboul Train
Strong match The Orient Express without a murderThree days, Ostend to Constantinople, the same train Christie would use two years later, and no body. Instead Greene puts aboard a Jewish currant trader called Myatt, a chorus girl called Coral Musker who faints in the corridor and whom he moves into first class, a schoolteacher called Dr John who is really Czinner, an exiled socialist going home on a forged passport to a rising in Belgrade that has already failed, a journalist who recognises him, and a burglar who boards at Vienna with a dead man behind him. They are not a cast; they are people who happen to share a corridor, and the train will not let them get away from each other.
Greene called it an entertainment and said he wrote it “deliberately” to please and to be filmed, and it was; it was his first success. It is also nastier than he let on. Czinner is taken off at Subotica. Coral is left there. Myatt calculates. The antisemitism directed at him comes from the other passengers and, as more than one reader has noticed, from the narration too, which is a thing to know before you begin. What it does that Christie does not is refuse to let the arrival mean anything. The train gets in. Some of them are on it.
- How it ends
- The train reaches Constantinople without two of the people you cared about, and Myatt has already turned to someone else.
- Contains
- Period antisemitism, some of it in the narration; A summary execution; A lesbian character written with 1932 contempt
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want the closed world of the train to be a refuge; here it is a trap with scheduled exits.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, Greene’s remarks, the Priestley libel threat, The Modern Novel: reading notes and the antisemitism problem
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Changing Track
Strong match One journey, one decisionPublished in French as La Modification, in English as Second Thoughts (1958), A Change of Heart (1959) and, in the revised Calder edition of 2017, Changing Track. All the same book: Léon Delmont, Paris manager of an Italian typewriter firm, takes the Friday morning train to Rome to tell his lover Cécile that he has found her a job in Paris and is leaving his wife. The whole novel is that journey, and it is written in the second person. You are Delmont. You watch the other passengers, you remember Rome, you rehearse the speech, and somewhere around Dijon the speech starts to come apart.
This is the only novel I know that is entirely on a train, start to finish, and it is the book the lists should be built around. It is a nouveau roman and it has a reputation for difficulty, which is undeserved; one recent reviewer called it “the most accessible nouveau roman I’ve come across”, and that is right. The train is doing what trains do to thought, which Butor names in one sentence: your reasoning “rolls on as relentlessly as the train itself”. By Rome you have decided something you did not board intending to decide, and you know why.
“the chain of your thoughts, forged more firmly by this journey, rolls on as relentlessly as the train itself” Stewart’s translation, late in the journey
- How it ends
- He arrives in Rome having decided not to do the thing he came to do, and resolves instead to write this book.
- Skip if
- Skip it if being addressed as “you” for two hundred pages will feel like a trick rather than a method.
Checked against: Wikipedia: editions, translations, the Prix Renaudot, plot, Into the Gyre: review of the 2017 Calder edition
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The Paris Express
Strong match A real train, a real crashThe photograph is famous: a steam locomotive hanging nose-down out of the first-floor wall of the Gare Montparnasse, 22 October 1895, after the Granville express overran the buffers. Donoghue, who wrote Room, puts you on that train for its eight hours from the Normandy coast and tells you from the first page what is going to happen to it. Aboard are real people she found in the passenger records and the papers: an ammunition manufacturer, the American painter Henry Tanner, a medical student, a young secretary at Gaumont called Alice Guy who will shortly invent narrative film; and one invented one, a girl called Mado with a bomb in her bag and deputies of the National Assembly in the next carriage.
It is the newest book in this tier and the most conventional: chapters run by station, the clock is on every page, and the suspense is Hitchcock’s bomb-under-the-table, held for the whole book. Kirkus called it “smart, skillful entertainment” and noted it is thinner than her earlier historical novels; the Guardian called it “a zippy Agatha Christie-like thriller”. Both are right. What it shares with the two books above it is the thing that makes a train a subject: everyone aboard has a destination and the train has its own.
- How it ends
- The train goes through the wall at Montparnasse, exactly as in the photograph, and who is standing underneath is the historical answer.
- Contains
- A bomb plot carried by a sympathetic character; One death in the crash; Period racism and sexism depicted
- Skip if
- Skip it if a novel that tells you its ending on page one and asks you to wait for it will feel like a countdown rather than a story.
Checked against: Kirkus review, Emma Donoghue: the book, editions, review quotes
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The Great Railway Bazaar
Looser match Non-fiction: the real linesThe only non-fiction here and the one that made railway travel a genre. In 1973 Theroux left London on the boat train and went by rail as far as rail would take him: the Orient Express in its shabby last years, through Turkey and Iran, the Khyber Pass, India end to end, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam during the war, Japan, and home across the whole of Russia on the Trans-Siberian. Robert Towers in the New York Times called it “the most consistently entertaining and the least boring book I have encountered in a long time”, and it sold a million and a half copies.
What makes it worth reading rather than merely knowing about is his rudeness. Theroux is unkind about nearly everyone he meets, and it reads as true because he is equally unkind about himself. “Luxury is the enemy of observation,” he writes, and rides third class to prove it. The book begins and ends with the same sentence, the one quoted above this list, and the reissue essays have made clear what the cheerful tone was hiding. Read it for the passengers; he did.
“Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing.” on the Orient Express, early
- How it ends
- It ends with the sentence it began with, and with a man home from four months away who does not yet know what he will find there.
- Contains
- 1973 attitudes to women and to Asia, unedited; Rudeness as method
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want the writer to like the people he describes; he mostly does not, and it is the point.
Checked against: Wikipedia: route, sales, the 2008 sequel, NYRB: Ian Jack, “Seduced by Trains” (2008), on what the book was hiding, Sourced quotations from the book
At a glance: how much of each book is actually on the train
The number the lists never give. “Aboard” is a reading estimate, not a page count. “Arrives” means the train reaches a destination that the book treats as one.
| Book | Aboard | The line | Arrives? | What the train is for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Murder on the Orient Express | Nearly all | Simplon Orient Express, Istanbul to Calais | Yes, eventually | A locked room the snow keeps shut |
| Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect | Nearly all | The Ghan, Darwin to Adelaide | Yes | A locked room with the rules read aloud |
| Bullet Train | All | Tōhoku Shinkansen, Tokyo to Morioka | Yes | A locked room where everyone is the murderer |
| Strangers on a Train | One chapter | New York to Texas | Yes, then the book leaves | The place a stranger says the unsayable |
| Compartment No. 6 | Nearly all | Trans-Siberian, Moscow to Ulan Bator | Yes | A cell shared for four thousand miles |
| The Train | About two thirds | A refugee train, the Ardennes to La Rochelle | Yes, and that is the tragedy | A suspension of a whole life |
| Stamboul Train | Most | Orient Express, Ostend to Constantinople | Yes, for some | A corridor nobody can leave until the timetable says |
| Changing Track | All | Paris to Rome, Gare de Lyon to Termini | Yes | Twenty hours in which a decision unmakes itself |
| The Paris Express | All | Granville to Paris-Montparnasse, 1895 | Through the wall | A clock counting down to a photograph |
| The Great Railway Bazaar | Most | London to Tokyo and back, 1973 | Yes; it is circular | A four-month bazaar of passengers |
| Snowpiercer | All | A loop around a frozen earth | Never | The whole of humanity, in order of class |
| The Cautious Traveller’s Guide | All | Beijing to Moscow through the Wastelands | Yes, changed | A sealed society for fifteen days |
| The Memory Fare | All but two chapters | The 11:47 from Ashwick Central, which does not exist | No destination | A place that charges you in memories to search it |
Page counts in the entries are for the editions named in the fact sheets; the Butor is given without one because the three English editions differ widely.
The train as the world: the two that removed the destination
The smallest tier, because almost nobody writes it. China Miéville’s Iron Council (2004) has the great image of a perpetual train laying its own track, but it is a third of a long political novel and not the book itself. These two are the ones where the train is all there is.
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Snowpiercer
Closest match The whole world, in order of classA graphic novel, French, first serialised in 1982 and not in English until Titan translated it in 2014, the year after Bong Joon-ho’s film. After a weapon has frozen the earth, what is left of humanity lives on a train of a thousand and one cars that never stops, because stopping is death. The tail is packed with the poor; the front has gardens, a brothel and the engine. Proloff escapes from the tail and is met by Adeline Belleau, who campaigns for the people back there, and the two are marched forward through the train by the authorities, car by car, so that the reader sees the whole society in order.
It is sparer and bleaker than the film, with none of the film’s revolution: the plan Proloff uncovers is to uncouple the tail with its people still aboard, and the ending is not a victory. Rochette’s art is heavy black ink and it suits the cold. Reviewers of the translation said it “still feels fresh some 30 years later”, and it does. This is the founding text of the train-as-world. What it does not have is a person: Proloff is a route through the train, not a character, and the book at the bottom of this page is about what happens when you put one aboard.
- How it ends
- Belleau dies of cold, Proloff is handed the engine, and the last panels leave one man alive, going round.
- Contains
- Class violence; Cannibalism, implied; A death by cold
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want the film’s ending; the book’s is colder and has no children in it.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication history, plot of The Escape, the sequels, Gale: bibliographic record of the Titan edition (translator, pages)
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The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands
Strong match A sealed train for fifteen days1899, and the only way from Beijing to Moscow is the Trans-Siberian Express of the Trans-Siberia Company: twenty armoured carriages, sealed, fifteen days, through a Siberia that has gone wrong. Nobody knows what the Wastelands are; the guidebook of the title advises passengers not to look too long out of the windows. Aboard are Marya, travelling under a false name to find out how her father died; Henry Grey, a disgraced naturalist who wants to be the first to catalogue what is out there; and Zhang Weiwei, sixteen, born on the train and raised by its crew, who knows every hiding place in it. On the last crossing something happened that the passengers cannot remember and the Company will not discuss.
It is the newest book in this tier and the closest in method to our own: the train has a destination, but for fifteen days it is the entire world, with its own water, air, class system and secrets, and the book is about the society that forms when the outside cannot be trusted. Reactor praised prose “poetic without being purple”; the Financial Times put it among the best science fiction of 2024. Fair warning: more than one reviewer found the last third loose, and one called the ending “a get-out clause”. The first two thirds are worth it.
- How it ends
- The train reaches the Wall outside Moscow no longer sealed, and the last chapters open rather than close.
- Contains
- Mild body horror from the Wastelands; A corporation lying about a crash; One death outside the train
- Skip if
- Skip it if you need a hard landing; the ending is the part the reviewers argued with.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, reception, the criticisms, Reactor review, Locus: Ian Mond’s review
“More than you think. And fewer than you’ll need.”
Every book in the third tier has to invent a rule that replaces arrival. Snowpiercer’s is that stopping is death. The one below is that every door costs you something of the person you came for, and you will never feel it go.
Where this page’s facts come from
- Wikipedia category: Novels set on trains — The thirty-title list that separates books set on trains from books with trains in them; the starting point for the cut list.
- LitHub: Emma Donoghue, “Literary locomotives” (2025) — One of the two ranking lists written by a novelist about her own train book; the source for Stamboul Train and The Wheel Spins being back in circulation.
- Electric Literature: Sarah Brooks, eight books set on trains (2024) — The other author-written list; Iron Council and Railsea come from here.
- NYRB: Ian Jack, “Seduced by Trains” (2008) — Theroux’s opening line, and his own account of what the book was hiding.
- agathachristie.com: Murder on the Orient Express — Christie’s 1928 journey, the door-handle notes, the Poirot line quoted above.
- Kirkus: Compartment No. 6 — Publication facts and the verdict quoted.
- Kirkus: Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect — The Ghan, the cast, the starred verdict.
- Kirkus: The Paris Express — Publication date, the real passengers, the verdict.
- Culture Court: Simenon’s The Train — The long essay on the novel and its ending.
- Into the Gyre: Changing Track (2018) — The Calder edition, the “most accessible nouveau roman” line, the quotation.
- Wikipedia: The Girl on the Train (novel) — For the misfire section: the Ashbury–Euston commute and where the plot actually happens.
- Wikipedia: Night Train to Lisbon — For the misfire section: one chapter aboard, the rest in Lisbon.
FAQ
Are there novels set entirely on a train, start to finish?
Fewer than the lists imply. Of the twelve books above, three never leave the train: Butor’s Changing Track (Paris to Rome, one journey, second person), Isaka’s Bullet Train (Tokyo to Morioka) and Donoghue’s The Paris Express (Granville to Montparnasse, eight hours). Snowpiercer cannot leave, by premise. Murder on the Orient Express, Compartment No. 6 and Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect are aboard for nearly everything. Strangers on a Train is aboard for one chapter, and The Girl on the Train is never really aboard at all. Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces (2021) is another candidate, a sleeper train called the Lucky Day with no clear destination, but it is so loose that even its admirers describe it as un-pin-down-able, and it is left off the main list for that reason.
Is Snowpiercer a book? Which one should I read?
Yes, and it came first. Le Transperceneige is a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, serialised in 1982, with sequels by Benjamin Legrand (1999, 2000) and Olivier Bocquet (2015). Titan Comics published the English translation in 2014, the year after Bong Joon-ho’s film. Read Volume 1, The Escape, which is the original Lob and Rochette story and complete in itself; it is about 110 pages and its ending is colder than the film’s. The TV series (2020–24) shares only the premise. There is no prose novel of Snowpiercer, which is one reason the third tier on this page is so short.
What should I read on a long train journey?
A different question, and the honest answer is: not usually a book set on a train, which makes you look up from the page at every station. If you want one anyway, Compartment No. 6 is the right length for a day and rewards a window. For the series on this site, The Memory Fare is about 24,000 words, a long evening, and was written for exactly this: one sitting, one journey, and a train you will be glad is not the one you are on.
The most quoted line in railway writing, and worth knowing what it cost. Ian Jack, reviewing the book’s reissue for the New York Review of Books, quotes Theroux’s later admission that he “made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering”: he came home from four months of trains to find his marriage over. The wish to be on the train is never only about the train. Most of the books on this page know it.