The 6:41 to Paris
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
After decades, former lovers come face to face in a novel filled with a "suspenseful dread that makes you want to turn every page at locomotive pace" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
Cécile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful, and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation almost thirty years ago.
In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles toward the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face-to-face journey—In silence? What could they possibly say to one another?—with the reader gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts. This intense, intimate novel offers "a taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape . . . Gripping" (Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story).
"Perfectly written and a remarkably suspenseful read . . . Absorbing, intriguing, insightful." —Library Journal (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two former lovers find themselves sitting next to each other on a train after 27 years apart in Blondel's novel, a bestseller in Europe, told through alternating interior monologues by both parties. C cile, now a successful entrepreneur living in Paris, is on her way home early in the morning after a weekend spent caring for her aging parents. She notes with no small satisfaction that her accidental companion, Philippe, has not aged so gracefully. As C cile correctly surmises, Philippe, en route to Paris to visit a dying friend, is recently divorced and somewhat aimless. Their overlapping narratives, unfolding over the course of their commute, lend insights into their former selves and the feelings of inadequacy and ambivalence that are perhaps endemic to middle age. Translator Anderson does an exceptional job of capturing C cile's and Philippe's voices, and effectively explores the meaning of the (English) phrase "take care" that closes the novel. There's suspense in the question of whether the two will gin up the courage to talk to each other, but that's really beside the point, as their thoughts compellingly trace the meandering paths between who they once were and who they are now.
