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Pascal Mercier

Night Train to Lisbon

A huge international bestseller, with over 2 million copies sold worldwide, Night Train to Lisbon is an utterly compelling novel about one man's escape from a humdrum life in search of passion and spontaneity.
Night Train to Lisbon tells the story of mild-mannered, middle-aged Classics scholar Raimund Gregorius. When, one afternoon, he walks out of his class while in the middle of giving a lesson, his uncharacteristic impulsiveness surprises him as much as his students. This break from his usually predictable routine is driven by two chance encounters that morning on his way to work — the first with a mysterious Portuguese woman, and the second with a book discovered in a forgotten corner of an old bookshop, the journal of an enigmatic Portuguese aristocrat. With the book as his talisman, Mundus finds himself boarding the night train to Lisbon on a journey to find out more about its author, Amadeu del Prado — who was this man whose words both haunt and compel him, seeming somehow clairvoyant?
His investigations lead him all over the city, and bring him into contact with those who were entangled in Prado's life. Gradually, he makes unexpected friends and the picture of an extraordinary man emerges: a difficult, brilliant, charismatic man, a doctor and a poet, and a rebel against Salazar's dictatorship. And as Prado's story comes to light so, too, Gregorius himself begins his life anew.
Hurtling through the dark, Night Train to Lisbon is a rich tale, wonderful told, propelled both by the mystery at its heart and its evocative subject.
479 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2009
Publication year
2009
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • Anders Viborgshared an impression4 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile

  • Natalie Haleshared an impression5 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    🎯Worthwhile

Quotes

  • Алиса Юрковаhas quoted2 years ago
    the dreary railroad station lamps slid past one after another into the dark.
  • browniehas quoted2 years ago
    It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, or the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.
  • browniehas quoted2 years ago
    To be able to part from something, he thought as the train started moving, you had to confront it in a way that created internal distance. You had to turn the unspoken, diffuse self-understanding it had wrapped around you into a clarity that showed what it meant to you.

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