Emma Donoghue, born in Dublin in 1969, has published novels, short fiction, plays, and literary history across more than three decades. She is best known to general readers for Room (2010), a novel narrated by a five-year-old held in captivity with his mother, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into the 2015 film for which Donoghue wrote the screenplay. Her earlier work draws heavily on archival research: Slammerkin (2000) recovered the case of an 18th-century murderer; The Sealed Letter (2008) reconstructed a Victorian divorce trial; Frog Music (2014) followed an unsolved 1876 killing in San Francisco. The Pull of the Stars (2020), set in a Dublin maternity ward during the 1918 influenza pandemic, was researched and largely written before COVID-19 arrived, then published into a world that read it differently.

The Paris Express extends this archival method. Donoghue’s Author’s Note details her research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s free online archive Gallica, where she read more than forty articles on the Montparnasse Derailment from twenty-six publications, and at the genealogy database filae.com, where she traced the family circumstances of the newspaper seller Marie Haguillard and the train’s crew. Roughly a dozen of the novel’s passengers are documented as having been on the train; others, including John Synge, Henry Tanner, Max Jacob, Marcelle de Heredia, and Madeleine Pelletier, were living in or near Paris in October 1895 and have been invited aboard plausibly.

Donoghue lived in Montparnasse during 2022 and 2023 while writing the novel, which gives the streetscapes their specificity. Her interest in characters at the edges of historical record—the unmarried mother, the colonial-era student, the sex worker, the queer politician—runs through the book and connects it to her earlier work in Inseparable (2010), her literary history of desire between women.