After decades, former lovers come face to face in a novel.
Cécile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful, and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation almost thirty years ago.
In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles toward the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face-to-face journey-In silence? What could they possibly say to one another?-with the reader gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts.
"Clever and gripping, The 6:41 to Paris offers an intimate look at what happens when, during a fateful meeting, two old flames are unexpectedly forced to face their lives and the choices they've made in the past. Through his masterful use of a dual narrative, Blondel takes the reader on an intense emotional journey, and, as the train rumbles down the tracks, the suspense builds. Unputdownable."
Samantha Vérant, author of Seven Letters from Paris: A Memoir
"...suspenseful dread that makes you want to turn every page at locomotive pace."
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"...a taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape . . . Gripping."
