Books like The Railwayman's Wife — picked by fans

When reading, I often mark passages and sentences I find especially evocative, powerful, insightful, or well-written. This novel is riddled with such marks. Freud does an exceptional job of creating a strong sense of time and place with elegant descriptions.

She explores the bonds between mothers and daughters, formed and broken, through three generations of women who all have a penchant for loving deeply flawed men. It’s a largely melancholy story and it stirred in me a wide range of painful emotions—heartache, disappointment, anger, frustration. Yet, the story contains moments of true beauty, as well, and ultimately concludes with a sense of brightness and redemption. 

This book provided me with a new perspective of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster that occurred when I was a teenager, as well as an inside view of the Soviet regime’s oppression during that time. The characters were real – hardworking, resilient, passionate, and imperfect.

This is not a thrilling page-turner or a happily-ever-after story. It’s a sad, terrifying, slow-burn of a book. It’s also beautiful, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful, with evocative prose and descriptive storytelling that haunted my thoughts long after I turned the final page. It remains on my bookshelf as one of my all-time favorites, awaiting a second read.

This is really three novels in one—three distinct stories of three generations of strong women spanning the 20th century in South America—and I loved them all. While each woman lived in different times and found strength through different means, they shared the common bonds of womanhood and motherhood and of stories about small miracles passed down for generations. 

De Robertis weaves an engaging saga with captivating, poetic prose that immerses the reader in a different time and place. I could taste the bitter mate tea, feel the humid air along the La Rambla river, and see the haze of cigarette smoke in a backroom bar. I return to it often, just to read a page or two, like returning for another sip from a fine wine.

I was most impressed by this author’s ability to show me the innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams of two main characters who lacked basic communication skills. Lynnie is developmentally disabled. Homan is deaf. Yet, each had a distinct voice and was a fully developed individual.

Their allegoric journeys spanned four decades, and I rooted for them from the opening page until I closed the book at the end. The author carried me along, back and forth, over and under, in an effortless braid of the two stories, introducing many colorful secondary characters along the way. While I had to suspend disbelief a bit to go along for the ride, it was well worth the trip.  

This is another book on the same subject written by an eminent historian and economist. I am recommending this book because of the clear and categorical historical decade-wise demarcations since the inception of railways in India since the 1830s. The 20th century is summarised in one entire chapter, bringing a contemporary context. One of the best parts of the book is a timeline of the government policies and committees on Indian Railways in a tabular form that gives a quick summary of how the organization progressed in its different forms, including the seamless transfer from old colonial railways to national railways adding the current reforms and policies. Another key feature of the book is that it gives a timeline of the various railway companies and railway lines spread across India.

I am also proud to mention that the book liberally quotes my first book when it mentions India’s railway… show more.

Last Train to Paradise is acclaimed novelist Les Standiford's fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad—one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. Brilliant and driven entrepreneur Henry Flagler's dream fulfilled, the Key West Railroad stood as a magnificent achievement for more than twenty-two years, heralded as "the Eighth Wonder of the World." Standiford brings the full force and fury of 1935's deadly Storm of the Century and its sweeping destruction of "the railroad that crossed an ocean" to terrifying life.

We tend to remember the railroad tycoons of the late 1800s in one of two ways–good or bad.

In the first, we imagine the Vanderbilts, Stanfords, and Goulds as the brilliant architects of the modern economy, “The Men Who Built America”–to quote the History Channel show. In the second, we imagine them as unscrupulous robber barons, evil geniuses who created the unequal corporate America that we still live in today. But what if both explanations give the railroad men far too much credit and responsibility?

In Richard White’s scathing and often hilarious book, he showcases these larger-than-life figures as bumbling, corrupt, and often bringing ruin and bankruptcy to their shareholders. They weren’t the mighty octopus we remember, but “a group of fat men in an octopus suit,” whose “tentacles of steel were as likely to be slapping at each other.”

Approaching the subject not as an imperial historian but as a specialist on transport, Wolmar dismantles the lie at the heart of a thousand TV documentaries: that the British bestowed railways on India in an act of benevolence.

Every TV commissioner in Britain should be made to read this.

I read Monisha Rajesh’s earlier travel memoir, Around India in 80 Trains, while planning my own train journey in India. In this one, she circumvents the entire globe (technically more than once in terms of mileage). It’s the kind of book I wish I’d written myself because I would love to do a train journey like this! I love Rajesh’s descriptions of the places she passes through and the people she meets along the way, and of course, how it changes her to see the world through this lens.

JP Daughton tells the horrifying story of the Congo-Océan railroad, a massive, ill-conceived construction project (1921-34) whose French overseers doomed some 20,000 African workers to die. This story, revealing as it does France’s imperial hubris and callous disregard of human suffering, should have been told a long time ago. But it has been buried by bureaucrats, overlooked by historians, and made invisible to those who chose not to see. We owe Daughton a great debt for bringing it to light and for masterfully adding a new chapter to the tragic history of Central Africa under European colonial rule.