Night Trains

Overview

Martin is an ordinary Australian twenty-something, whose comfortable, well-ordered life gets turned on its head when he starts seeing and hearing things each night at the nearby semi-deserted railway yards: mysterious lights, people who disappear when followed, steam trains that aren¿t supposed to be there. Taken to the edge of sanity, Martin eventually learns that he is to ride the ¿night trains¿ every night back to wartime Europe to rescue Jews and help the resistance. But before the war ends, Martin will have to confront his SS nemesis, save the woman he loves, and face a terrible secret from the past that can destroy him before he can accomplish his mission. This is an extraordinarily original work, mixing a modern-day setting with alternate reality and time travel; it¿s both a supernatural war thriller and a fascinating psychological profile of what happens when your life gets turned upside down by events outside your control. Imagine Steven King meets Robert Ludlum on a night train crossing in Nazi-occupied Europe. A superbly original first novel!

¿Tense, witty, frightening and complex, Night Trains is both a gripping, edge-of-your-seat supernatural thriller and a haunting, intelligent exploration of reality, and how the past can continue not only to disturb

but shape the future. Starting in a shared flat in a typical Australian city in an unremarkable present, it begins to shade first into the terrifying landscape of nightmare and madness, and then into the even greater terror of wartime Poland. Though it has the disturbance-of reality quality of an M.R. James or a Stephen King, Night Trains is startlingly original in its substance and its impact. And Arthur Chrenkoff has managed to pack more incident, character, and meaning into his short, punchy yet luxuriously vivid and sensual novella than many writers manage in twice the length. It is, quite simply, an unforgettable novel, with remarkable filmic qualities.¿ ¿ Sophie Masson, author of Forest of Dreams (The Lay Lines trilogy) and The Lady of Flowers (both Random House) among many other books.