In her latest novel, The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue provides a vivid account of late 19th-century France, exploring the fears and desires of the time through a group of passengers — diverse in their social class, age and occupation, aboard the Granville-Paris express.
“The novel encapsulates Belle Époque in all its speedy, multicultural, complicated glory — a time surprisingly like our own,” Donoghue told CBC Books in an email.
The fascinating stories of the passengers, including a young boy traveling solo, a pregnant woman on the run, a medical student and the devoted railway workers, are woven around the central, suspenseful plot of a young anarchist on a mission.
But this isn’t just any ordinary travel day — Donoghue sets the story on the fateful day of the 1895 French railway disaster, an event that inspired her to reimagine the incident after seeing a photograph of it.
“I wanted to know everything about who was riding on that train — crew as well as passengers, rich and poor, and how on earth it happened,” she said.
Donoghue is an Irish Canadian writer whose books include the novels Landing, Room, Frog Music, The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars, Learned by Heart and the children’s book The Lotterys Plus One. Room was an international bestseller and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Brie Larson.
Her novel The Pull of the Stars was longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. It is now on the longlist for Canada Reads 2025. The final five books and the panellists who chose them will be revealed on Jan. 23, 2025.
The Paris Express will be out on March 18, 2025.
Donoghue will also soon embark on an North American book tour supporting the new novel and you can read an excerpt of The Paris Express below.
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Half past eight in the morning, on the twenty-second of October, 1895, in Granville, on the Normandy coast. Stocky, plain, and twenty-one, in her collar, tie, and boxy skirt, Mado Pelletier stands across the street from the little railway station holding her lidded metal lunch bucket, watching.
The down train, as they call any service from the capital, deposited Mado here yesterday afternoon, sooty and bone- jarred. Only now does it occur to her that she could have waited until this morning to leave Paris, disembarked early at Dreux, Surdon, or Flers, bought what she needed, and caught the next express back. All that really matters is that she be on a fast train to Paris by lunchtime on the twenty-second.
She supposes she came all the way to Granville because it’s the end of the line. The Company of the West’s posters call this wind-raked town the Monaco of the North. In the hours Mado’s been here, she hasn’t sought out the lighthouse or the casino or any of the so-called sights of this resort, off-season. Except one — she had a hankering to, for once in her life, set eyes on the sea.
It wasn’t pretty like everyone said.
It wasn’t pretty like everyone said. Wonderfully fierce, in fact — those waves biting into the stones of the beach yesterday evening as the sun went down behind the empty Lady Bathers’ hall. Hard to believe in October that invalids flocked here every summer to be wheeled out in bathing machines and half drowned for their health. Mado found a sandy patch and even made an attempt at a castle.
She’s always loved being outside, staying out late, spending as little time as possible in the room that has a tang of rot at the back of the Pelletiers’ greengrocery in Paris. (It had to hold all four of them when Mado was growing up, but it’s just her and her long-faced mother now.) Mado’s best memory is of setting off firecrackers in the street one Bastille Day. So this trip to Granville is the kind of thing she’d have enjoyed hugely when she was younger. Not that her parents would ever have been able to spare the money. Like much of the population of the famously wealthy City of Light, even before she was widowed, Madame Pelletier lived by the skin of her teeth. Her daughter’s been planning this trip since she turned twenty-one. Mado spent last night in a room on the unfashionable inland side of the Granville train station, picked at random and paid for with the few coins she hadn’t set aside for buying supplies. She blew out the lantern and squeezed her eyes shut for hours at a time, but her mind would never stop buzzing long enough to let her fall asleep.
Up at dawn this Tuesday morning, like a good housewife she did her shopping as soon as the shutters opened. Back in the shabby room, she made her meticulous preparations before leaving in plenty of time to catch the up train to Paris. So what’s preventing Mado from walking into Granville Station now and taking her seat in a Third-Class carriage? What’s keeping her feet — still stubby, child-size, in second-hand boots — rooted to the pavement?
Motionless at her side, a small boy with a schoolbag over his shoulders stares at the station entrance as if imitating Mado. She gives him a glare, but his round eyes don’t even blink.
“Come on, in you go,” she tells herself. The strap of her satchel cuts uncomfortably between her breasts.
A fellow glides by on a bicycle, smirking and waggling his eyebrows at her. Mado’s been getting this a lot in Granville. That’s the price of wearing a tailored jacket with short, oiled-down hair. Even back in Paris, where quite a few young women go about à l’androgyne, sneers and jeers have come Mado’s way ever since she scraped together the cash to buy this outfit at a flea market last year. Her hair she cuts herself with the razor that was one of the few possessions her father had when he died.
Bad enough to have been born female, but she refuses to dress the part.
She’ll take sneers and jeers over lustful leers any day. Bad enough to have been born female, but she refuses to dress the part. Stone-faced, Mado checks the set of her cravat, then her hat. Her mother’s always nagging her to make half an effort to catch a husband when the fact is there’s nothing Mado wants less. Even if you got a kind one like her papa, marriage uses you up like a fruit. Mado likes to look at a handsome fellow as much as the next girl, but if the choice is virginity or slavery, she’ll take virginity. “Like the Maid of Orléans,” she thinks, straightening her back.
And then: “The Maid of Orléans would be on the blasted train by now. Get moving — unless you mean to miss it?”
Adapted and excerpted from The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue, published by HarperCollins Canada. Copyright © 2025 Emma Donoghue. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Canada. All rights reserved.
