Paula Hawkins

There are three narrators in THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, but the book is undoubtedly Rachel’s story. It is through Rachel’s eyes that we see most of the action: it is in Rachel’s fevered thoughts that we find ourselves immersed. Rachel is the reader’s eyes and ears, Rachel is our unreliable witness. She is many other things, too: an ex-wife, a daughter, a commuter, an alcoholic, a woman who yearns for a child she cannot have. She is lonely, she is ostracized. She is an outsider. Rachel is the sort of character you will find in all three of my novels, including my most recent, A SLOW FIRE BURNING. My books are filled not with happy, well-adjusted people from nuclear families but with people who, for one reason or another, find themselves outside of the bounds of “accepted social structures.” Rachel in THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN and Laura and Miriam in A SLOW FIRE BURNING are people who are just about hanging on by their fingernails, at the point of slipping through the cracks. It is through these characters -- women who are struggling, who are pushed to extremes – that I explore the novels’ themes: women’s place in society, the impact of trauma on our bodies and minds, the slipperiness of memory, the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56213354-a-slow-fire-burning