Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

1. Which passenger’s storyline did you find yourself most eager to return to between chapters, and why?

2. How did knowing from Chapter 1 that the train was “heading straight for disaster” (26) shape your reading of the journey?

3. How did the novel’s large cast affect your experience as a reader? Did the sheer number of characters deepen the sense of a shared human community or make emotional connection with their narratives more difficult?

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. Have you ever shared a meaningful conversation with a stranger in transit? If so, how does it compare to the carriage encounters in the novel?

2. Marcelle weighs whether to speak up about Jeanne’s symptoms; have you faced a moment when knowledge made silence feel impossible?

3. Mado believes her personal suffering and political grievances justify her plan. Reflecting on your own convictions (social, political, or environmental), where would you personally draw the line between fighting for a cause and the risk of harming others?

4. Blonska resolves to leave the world “a little cleaner” than she found it, believing that even small acts of care matter. What does that idea mean in your own life? Are there ordinary habits, responsibilities, or acts of kindness that you think genuinely improve the lives of those around you, even if they do not solve larger problems?

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. The lois scélérates (“villainous laws”) criminalized anarchist sympathies after a series of bombings. What does the novel suggest about how governments respond to political violence? Did the tensions between security, surveillance, public fear, and civil liberties remind you of any modern-day responses to terrorism or extremism

2. How does the novel explore race through Henry’s inherited memory of racist violence on a Washington streetcar and Marcelle’s background as the daughter of a Black Cuban-born politician mocked in the French press? What do their conversations reveal about France at the end of the 19th century?

3. Christophle’s furtive encounter with the railwayman takes place under the threat of exposure, legal consequences, and social ruin. What did this scene suggest to you about the risks, coded behaviors, and emotional compromises surrounding queer life in this period?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. How does the rotating point of view across two dozen characters affect the pacing of suspense in the second half of the novel?

2. What is the function of the Barthélemy epigraph “Every great invention costs a few lives!” (vii)? How does its irony register differently before and after the crash?

3. Donoghue occasionally shifts the narrative perspective to Engine 721 herself. How did those sections affect your experience of the train and the approaching crash? What changes emotionally or morally when the narration moves onto the footplate or inside the boiler rather than remaining entirely with the human passengers?

4. Donoghue places real historical figures such as John Millington Synge, Henry Tanner, and Alice Guy alongside fictional passengers on the Paris Express. How did that blending of documented history and invented lives affect your experience of the novel?

5. Clocks, schedules, timetables, delayed departures, and “lost minutes” recur constantly throughout the journey. How does this structural device function as more than historical atmosphere or period decoration?

6. In the novel’s closing image, the photographer deliberately crops Marie Haguillard out of the frame. What does this choice suggest about the recording of significant historical events?

Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.

1. Write the diary entry Mado might compose that night after dumping the contents of her bucket into the rubbish bin.

2. Imagine a second short chapter from Engine 721’s point of view, set after she has been hauled back onto the rails. What does her perspective reveal now?

3. If you were directing a film adaptation of The Paris Express, who would you cast in the main roles? Which carriage would you open with, and whose face would fill the first frame?