I MADE YOU UP INSIDE MY HEAD

Strangers on a train affect each other’s lives deeply through shared experiences of very different kinds of trauma.

In Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, a character named Philip Traum reminds a group of young people that every time a human makes a choice, they change their predetermined path. Pérez-Carbonell has her protagonist, Alicia, a translator, make a big decision in this novel’s first scene, which takes place in Madrid’s Atocha station; her epigraph from Sartre—“the whole tale was made up of things that were in relation to one another”—clues readers in to the fact that Alicia’s story may be complicated. Having decided to live and work in London for a job that requires her to travel by train to Edinburgh each month, one evening Alicia meets two men, Terence Milton and Mick “Bo” Boulder, in a sleeper compartment. Terry, an important mentor to the younger man, has published a novel, Rocco, to great scandal, at least according to a journalist who has uncovered the real-life model for Rocco, a man named Hans Haig. As Alicia slowly learns the story behind Terry’s humiliation, she also recalls her own all-too-recent humiliation: being abandoned on a remote island by her botanist boyfriend, Daniel. Terry’s account, chapters from his novel, Alicia’s pain, and Hans’ secrets all make up a sinuous narrative that proves something Alicia says toward the beginning: “Although all stories come to an end, not one of them does so completely; they are slowly woven together, just as these fragments were, waiting to form a larger tapestry.” However, there’s something deeper at play than mere tale-telling, as becomes evident when both the real and fictional versions of Hans’/Rocco’s life are set forth and Alicia identifies so strongly with the absent Hans that she embarks on a search to make sure he’s safe—a search that, like The Mysterious Stranger, brings into high relief the question of whether or not humans have free will or are primarily acting out their subconscious.

Unsettling and powerful, this novel about who and what we choose to believe is a triumph.