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. This intense, intimate novel offers "a taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape . . . Gripping" (Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story).

"Perfectly written and a remarkably suspenseful read . . . Absorbing, intriguing, insightful." --Library Journal (starred review)