The Paris Express
by Emma Donoghue
“A railway carriage is as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.” You’ll find plenty of intimacy but few displays of party manners among the passengers Donoghue introduces in THE PARIS EXPRESS (Summit Books, 274 pp., $26.99),which takes place on a train departing from the Normandy coast in the autumn of 1895 with a bomb-toting anarchist aboard. Adding even more uncertainty to a dangerous situation is a flaw in young Mado Pelletier’s plan — “riding for hours in third class means getting familiar with these people before she has to kill them.”
Donoghue’s novel was inspired by an actual French railway disaster, and while she sketches convincing portraits of many of the real-life participants, she can’t resist adding some people “who could have been there” — including the American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and the Irish playwright John Millington Synge — who were living in or near Paris at the time.
As the train speeds toward the capital, vignettes in the various carriages provide a tension-filled panorama of fin-de-siècle French society. We see the crew struggling to keep to an impossible schedule, the blue-collar crowd jostling and bickering in the cheap seats, even the pampered occupants of a lushly carpeted private car. And always in the background is our awareness of Mado’s homemade explosive, packed into a lunch pail, awaiting detonation.
The Jackal’s Mistress
by Chris Bohjalian
The true story of a wounded Union officer saved by a Confederate woman amid the shifting battle lines in the Shenandoah Valley was the subject of a magazine article Bohjalian published in 2003. Now, in THE JACKAL’S MISTRESS (Doubleday, 318 pp. $29), he returns to this historical material, adding imaginative twists to the original story line. In his telling, Libby Steadman has always been on shaky ground with her neighbors: When her father-in-law died, her husband, Peter, freed the family’s slaves. And although Peter fought for the rebel cause and now languishes in a Union prison camp, that principled act has led others to suspect his wife of less than ironclad loyalty.
Left to run her husband’s gristmill with an elderly Black couple who chose to remain there as employees, she seems mainly focused on sheer survival. But when Capt. Jonathan Weybridge is severely wounded in battle and left to die after the Union retreat, Libby feels honor bound to do for him what she hopes a Union woman would do for her husband.
