Reading Order
The Girl on the Train Reading Order
Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train (2015) is a complete standalone novel. There is no sequel, though Hawkins has written other standalone psychological thrillers (Into the Water, A Slow Fire Burning). The novel follows three women — Rachel, who commutes past the house where she sees a couple she has idealized from the train window; Megan, the woman she watches; and Anna, who lives in Rachel's old house. When Megan disappears, Rachel becomes involved in the investigation. The Girl on the Train sold over 23 million copies worldwide.
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The Girl on the Train
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The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins·2015·Standalone — Rachel sees a couple from the train window every day and constructs a story about them; when the woman disappears, Rachel becomes involved in the investigation; multiple narrators, multiple timelines
The Girl on the Train — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Girl on the Train a standalone?
Yes — The Girl on the Train is a complete standalone novel. Paula Hawkins has written two other standalone psychological thrillers, Into the Water (2017) and A Slow Fire Burning (2021), but The Girl on the Train has no sequel.
Is The Girl on the Train similar to Gone Girl?
The Girl on the Train was widely marketed in the wake of Gone Girl's success and shares several features: an unreliable first-person female narrator, a marriage in crisis, a woman who disappears, and a late-novel revelation about what actually happened. They differ in tone (The Girl on the Train is darker and more conventional in its thriller mechanics; Gone Girl is more interested in gender politics and dark comedy) and in quality of prose.
Is the film adaptation of The Girl on the Train good?
The Girl on the Train was adapted into a film in 2016, directed by Tate Taylor and starring Emily Blunt as Rachel. The film moved the setting from London to New York. It received mixed reviews; most critics found the adaptation competent but less effective than the novel's specific use of unreliable narration, which works better in prose than in film.
What makes Rachel an unreliable narrator in The Girl on the Train?
Rachel has a drinking problem that causes blackouts — she cannot trust her own memory of events, and neither can the reader. Hawkins uses the alcoholic blackout as a mechanism for generating genuine uncertainty: Rachel may or may not have witnessed something on the night of Megan's disappearance, and she may or may not have been involved in something she cannot remember. This is a more specific and less structurally radical form of unreliability than Amy Dunne's in Gone Girl, but it generates real suspense.
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