By Emily R. Zarevich, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The room buzzed like a train station at rush hour. A keen crowd of Burlington readers anticipated a journey through Paris, though they probably hoped for a smoother trip than the one Irish Canadian author Emma Donoghue depicts in her new novel. When does a train ride stop being romantic? Donoghue’s The Paris Express sets out to answer that question, immortalizing in its pages what happened in 1895 when disaster struck Europe’s most-visited city and its most ridden route from Normandy. Who was on board, who survived, what are their stories, and how can they possibly move on from this incident?
On Wednesday, April 9, 2025, the Burlington Central Library welcomed Donoghue as a guest speaker at its annual Burlington Lyrics and Poetry Festival. Donoghue took the stage alongside writer and editor Sarah Laing to present a stirring discussion about Donoghue’s latest contribution to her repertoire, The Paris Express. Local independent bookstore A Different Drummer Books was on hand with a selection of Donoghue’s works for sale, and the stall parted with many copies of The Paris Express. Though there are plenty of modern-day events and catastrophes to occupy our time presently, the people of Burlington are also clearly invested in what happened on that calamitous day in Paris in 1895 through Donoghue’s imaginative lens.
Donoghue is the author of other celebrated historical novels, including The Wonder, set in Ireland after the potato famine, and The Pull of the Stars, also set in Ireland but during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. So what brought Donoghue away from her native Ireland to Paris?
“It was a ready-made novel,” says Donoghue. The Paris Express was inspired by a series of shocking but breathtaking photographs taken of the train post-crash. During her discussion with Laing, Donoghue described deep dives into archives and meticulously fact-checking the details of nineteenth-century railway engineering, such as checking the heat of the engine by frying an egg on a shovel. She also cited her Dublin childhood of writing poetry about fairies and religious topics as her apprenticeship for what would later become a prolific career in fantastical fiction writing.
Following her talk with Laing and a book signing for the assembled crowd, Donoghue agreed to speak further about her process of writing historical fiction and what her aspirations are if The Paris Express is ever adapted for the screen like The Wonder was in 2022. Answers have been lightly edited for flow.
What is it about a piece of history that stands out as good book material?
That’s a good question because it’s certainly not just any old bit of history, and it’s often not the most representative bit of history. The little incidents that I fixate on don’t tend to be the ones that are the most representative of their time. They’re often downright odd. There’s often something peculiar about them. Or something has kind of a built-in twist. Sometimes there’s a very sad story, but with a little moment of triumph in it, or someone who is very downtrodden. In The Paris Express, I tell the story of Paul Gaugin’s model Annah. It’s a story of exploitation and racism. She disappears from the historical records, so instead of having an entire life to weigh up, it’s just a sort of tantalizing little incident. And then I have to imagine the rest.
What are some techniques for translating historical facts into fiction so it doesn’t come across as a textbook excerpt?
I think the most crucial thing is point of view. For instance, in my first historical novel, Slammerkin, I knew who the king was at the time. But I thought about how my main character, this teenage sex worker, is not going to give a damn who’s on the throne. It makes no difference to her. So I’ll leave that out. It’s about running all of your material through the filter of what your point-of-view character would know or would notice about their society. You take out things they would never think or point out. It’s a classic sort of mistake for historical fiction to say something like “She walked down the wooden sidewalk.” I mean, she’s probably used to wooden sidewalks. She’s not going to say they’re wooden.
This is why writers often use an outsider character, because an outsider notices things about the village or the city or the environment that the locals always see. A stranger coming to town is a very good point of view because only then is the character most likely to comment on things while everyone else thinks, “That’s just how it is.” You can’t have an actual time traveler in most cases, but you can at least have someone coming from a very different living situation who notices the wooden sidewalks.
If this book were made into a movie or miniseries, what would be most important for the adaptation?
Even though having a large ensemble cast is a distinct pleasure in a series like Game of Thrones, you have to be really careful to have a clear enough storyline uniting them. With a book, people can really take their time and read something a little bit at a time, but with any performance art like a play or a film or a TV series, people expect the timing of it to be planned by you so they don’t get too restless. It’s not necessary that you need a lot of plots, but you need a very clear plot to keep the whole thing tied together.
If you’re interested in purchasing a copy of Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express for yourself and boarding Donoghue’s train of thought, you can shop local by visiting A Different Drummer Books on 513 Locust Street, located downtown. The Lyrics and Poetry Festival will continue at Burlington’s library branches until the end of April. Next up on the agenda is Lisa Shen, the author of A Story Ending in Redwoods, who will be holding her “Creating a Poetry Chapbook” workshop on Sunday, April 13, 2025, at the Tansley Woods Library.
