THE LONDON TRAIN

Tessa Hadley is the author of The Master Bedroom, Sunstroke and Other Stories, Everything Will Be All Right, and Accidents in the Home. Sunstroke and Other Stories was a New York Times Notable Book of 2007, and Accidents in the Home was long-listed for The Guardian’s First Book Award. Her short stories appear regularly in The New Yorker. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.

“At once a melancholy and delightful story. . . . Hadley’s twin narratives are perfectly tuned and heavy with lacerating observations about the way fate works.”—Publishers Weekly

“Hadley’s writing is beautiful. . . . Lovers of character-driven literary fiction will enjoy this novel.”—Library Journal

“In spare, incisive prose, Hadley probes this pair of only children marked by the deaths of their mothers, playing with chronology to lay open the pasts that shaped them. This is a keenly perceptive and wise novel, illustrating that however important the past is in our lives, only the present, glimpsed in the final pages, truly matters.”—Booklist

“There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel. . . . Hadley’s writing is reliably fluid and absorbing, and her balancing of contemporary issues and the life of the mind faultless.”—Catherine Taylor, Sunday Telegraph Magazine (London)

In the course of the novel, both Cora and Paul lose their mothers. How does this affect each of them, individually, and in what ways are their reactions different? How do their losses affect the next steps Cora and Paul take, and the choices they make, in their lives?

At the time that Paul reconnects with Pia, father and daughter are somewhat estranged.  In what ways does Pia’s new living arrangement provide her with a substitute family? In the end, Pia returns home. What do you think Hadley is suggesting about modern family life, its cohesiveness or incohesiveness?

Why is Paul drawn to Marek?  What is it about driving to make deliveries, and sleeping on the apartment couch, that attracts Paul?

The Guardian (UK) describes Paul and Cora’s stories as “two mirroring halves”; mirrors are also alluded to frequently in the book.  In what ways do Paul and Cora serve as reflections of one another, and in what ways do they contrast, or serve as foils to one another?

Early in the book, Willis, a neighboring farmer, threatens to cut back aspen trees on the border of Paul and Elise’s property.  How does Paul react to this threat? What does the conflict signify?

Paul and Cora’s meeting—and its consequences—actually take place before the main action of the book. How would the impact on your reading have been different if the connection between Paul and Cora had been straightforward from the beginning of the novel, and revealed chronologically?  Did you find the oblique way in which their connection was revealed frustrating?  Did you find it successful?  Why?

Paul and Cora are both, on some level, conscious of their own social class as being different from that of their spouses.  Does this “class consciousness” affect both of them the same way?

Following her split with Paul, how much of Cora’s anguish has to do with losing him?  How much stems from her loss of the baby?

“Both Cora and Paul’s lives are uprooted, physically and emotionally; both suffer loss, heartache and lust, and find temporary stability in an unexpected place” (Financial Times).

For much of the book, Cora and Paul are between places, in transit, or in temporary living situations.  What does this imply about their emotional lives?  What is the significance of Paul and Cora’s chance encounter taking place on the train? What role does transit play in the book, in general?