The Paris Express (2025) is Emma Donoghue’s historical novel built around the real Montparnasse Derailment of October 22, 1895, when a Granville-to-Paris express tore through the buffers and front wall of a Parisian station. Donoghue assembles roughly two dozen passengers and crew aboard Engine 721 and follows them across a single day’s journey. The novel works through three interlocking concerns: The Human Cost of Technological Progress, The Possibilities of Connections with Strangers, and The Motivations for an Anarchist Mentality.

This guide is based on the 2025 hardcover edition published by Summit Books.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of illness and death, child death, child abuse, suicidal ideation and self-harm, pregnancy loss, racism, religious discrimination, anti-gay bias, sexual content, and substance use.

Plot Summary

On the morning of October 22, 1895, 21-year-old Mado Pelletier hesitates outside the railway station in Granville, on the Normandy coast, holding a metal lunch bucket. The daughter of a widowed Parisian greengrocer, she wears a tailored jacket, tie, and short hair. The bucket holds a homemade bomb she has built from saltpetre, sugar, acids, and matches, lined with nails and rigged to detonate when inverted. She has chosen the morning express to Paris hoping to kill a member of parliament traveling to the opening session of the National Assembly. At the last moment she leaps aboard.

The same train carries a wide cross-section of late-century French society. Seven-year-old Maurice Marland boards alone for the first time, bound for Dreux, where his father will meet him. Junior guard Jean Le Goff settles First-Class passengers and collects tips. Senior guard Léon Mariette prides himself on maintaining the railway’s standards, despite exhaustion and constant back pain. He finishes his safety checks and climbs into his rooftop birdcage on the Front Baggage van. On the footplate, driver Guillaume Pellerin and stoker Victor Garnier cook eggs on the shovel and ready Engine 721. Sixty-year-old Blonska, a Russian émigrée and committed atheist drags herself from the station platform where she slept. She enters Third Class with knitting and 200 francs she means to give to worthy causes in Paris.

As the express pulls out, the passengers settle into their carriages. The American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner rides in Second Class to spare himself the social vigilance of First, thinking of the segregated railways in his country. In Middle Third, the young Irish writer John Synge takes notes on a North African coffee seller named Hakim, a young woman who calls herself Annah Lamor with a monkey on her shoulder, and two students from the Colonial School, Max Jacob and his Cambodian roommate Kiouaup. In First Class, medical student Marcelle de Heredia (daughter of the Cuban-born former politician Severiano de Heredia) rides with the automobile maker Émile Sarazin-Levassor, his wife Louise, her 17-year-old daughter Jeanne, and Fulgence Bienvenüe, the engineer in chief for bridges and roads who is sketching plans for an underground Métro. Marcelle observes Jeanne’s bruises and pallor and begins to suspect leukemia.

At Vire, Mado lingers on the platform asking Mariette about important passengers. Alice Guy, the 22-year-old secretary to camera-firm owner Léon Gaumont, returns from a business trip with a Demenÿ chronophotographic camera (an early motion-picture device that records sequential frames) and steers her boss into Tanner’s carriage to avoid the appearance of impropriety. After Vire, Blonska shares coffee with Mado, Hakim, and a Breton maid called Madame Baudin, and registers Mado’s anger. Mado, watching the carriages fill, decides to wait. Marcelle gently raises the possibility that Jeanne should have her blood tested for “milkiness.” Louise, furious at unsolicited speculation from an unqualified student, calls her “a stupid girl with notions” (96). Mortified, Marcelle disembarks at Flers and moves to an empty Second-Class carriage with her Dactyle typewriter. At Flers, Le Goff also tells Mado that a deputy for Orne will board at the next stop, and she smiles.

The express makes an unscheduled halt at Briouze to attach a private carriage belonging to Albert Silas Christophle, deputy for Orne and bank governor, traveling with his invalid wife Anna, their grandson, and her greyhound. Christophle privately plans where in Paris he might find a sexual encounter with a man that evening. The munitions manufacturer Jules-Félix Gévelot, also a deputy, boards Rear First with his wife and her friend after a hunting trip with Christophle. Mado learns that two deputies are now aboard and that a third will board at Surdon. She lifts her bomb onto her lap, then sets it back down. Tanner, regretting his earlier silence, crosses into Marcelle’s carriage on a pretext and apologizes. In Front Third, Blonska draws out a pregnant blonde passenger named Cécile Langlois, unmarried and carrying the child of a soldier sent to Madagascar; Mado breaks in with anti-religious views and reveals that, as a child, she assisted the midwife through her mother’s repeated miscarriages.

At Surdon, the comte de Lévis-Mirepoix, the third Orne deputy, boards with a married woman who is not his wife and is forced to join the Gévelot party in Rear First. Le Goff, checking carriages, finds Tanner in Marcelle’s compartment with a First-Class ticket. Tanner suffers a sudden heavy nosebleed, and Marcelle takes charge with her handkerchief. Once the bleeding stops, he tells her about being ejected as an infant from a Washington streetcar in a snowstorm after a man pulled back his mother’s veil and used a racial slur. Marcelle tells him about her brother Henri’s drowning at Calais, which sparked her interest in physiology, and offers him a sentence to repeat: “this is not then [...] here is not there” (172). They share lunch.

In Front Third, Blonska becomes convinced that Mado’s lunch bucket holds a bomb. Mado catches her expression and decides she will detonate the device when the train enters Montparnasse. Blonska feels paralyzed, afraid that any warning will prompt Mado to set it off at once. Cécile then goes into labor on the bench. On the footplate, Pellerin agrees to push Engine 721 above the speed limit to recover lost minutes for their Christmas bonus, which can reach a full month’s pay. At Dreux, Maurice sleeps through his stop. Le Goff, summoned by Blonska to Cécile’s side, is met by Mado holding up the lunch bucket pointedly; Blonska cannot bring herself to speak. On the platform, Louise approaches Marcelle and apologizes, asking her to explain the test for milky blood and what leukemia would mean; Marcelle mentions only palliative treatments. At the back of the station, Christophle has a brief paid encounter with a railwayman in the urinal and runs back to reboard the moving train.

Past Dreux, in driving rain, Pellerin pushes Engine 721 well over the speed limit through the Paris suburbs, ignoring rules at signal points. Bienvenüe, counting telegraph poles, clocks the speed. Cécile’s labor advances; Blonska realizes the baby’s shoulder is stuck and calls Mado, whose midwife knowledge from her mother’s bedside is the carriage’s best resource. Mado pushes her lunch bucket under the bench, sterilizes her hands with brandy, and reaches in to free the trapped arm. On the footplate, Garnier opens the Westinghouse air brake (the standard fail-safe pneumatic brake on French express trains) and nothing happens. Pellerin tries it repeatedly, then the hand brake, reverse steam, and the sandbox. The train will not stop.

Le Goff applies his rear brakes. Mariette, who has briefly fallen asleep, wakes to the alarm whistle and begins cranking the hand brake from his birdcage. In Front First, Alice sets up the Demenÿ camera against the window and films the approach. Pellerin shouts at Garnier to jump and, getting no response, throws himself off and lands stunned on the opposite track. Engine 721 smashes through the wooden buffers, carries across thirty meters of concourse, and pierces the front wall of Montparnasse Station. In Place de Rennes below, the newspaper seller Marie Haguillard sees the engine burst out of the lunette window before the falling masonry kills her; she is the crash’s only fatality.

The engine and tender hang out of the station façade; the passenger carriages remain on the concourse. Mariette gashes his thigh climbing from his birdcage. Alice, bruised, demands that Gaumont let her keep the Demenÿ camera, and he agrees. Garnier, thrown into a customs booth awning, calls for Pellerin, fearing him dead. Cécile’s baby is delivered alive on the bench, swaddled in donated cloth, with coins pressed into her hand by other women in the carriage. The Sarazin-Levassors, Bienvenüe, the Christophles, the Gévelots, and the comte all emerge unhurt. Marcelle disembarks with Tanner, leaves him with the guards, and hurries off in English so the listening men cannot follow. In Front Third, the lunch bucket has tipped over without detonating. Mado carries it out, dumps the contents into a rubbish bin, pockets the acid vials to dispose of in a drain, and walks past the wreckage. Ashamed of the egotism of her terrorist plan, she resolves to adopt Blonska’s philosophy of improving the world through small gestures. A young photographer composing a shot of the crashed engine notices workmen scooping Marie Haguillard’s remains into a bucket, recoils, and reframes his picture to exclude her, taking the photograph that will become the iconic image of the event.