A train on a fateful trajectory is the location for a zippy Agatha Christie-like thriller giving a taste of life in fin-de-siècle France

When an express train smashes through the barriers at Montparnasse, screeches across the concourse and emerges through an exterior wall, panicked onlookers assume it’s a terrorist attack. Plus ça change; this happened in October 1895 and is the inspiration for Emma Donoghue’s new novel, which takes place on that train as it hurtles from Granville to Paris.

Donoghue specialises in contained settings. She is best known for the 2010 novel Room, narrated by a child who has been raised in a single room by his kidnapped mother. The Wonder is set mostly in a cramped 19th-century rural Irish cottage, then in 2020 came The Pull of the Stars, located, with eerie prescience, in the pandemic isolation ward of a Dublin maternity hospital in 1918. Most recently, there was 2022’s Haven, where Donoghue isolates three seventh-century monks on a speck of rock in the Irish Sea.