Malma Station
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A train races through a stark summer landscape. Everyone on board is traveling to Malma Station, and no one realizes how their fates are intertwined, in this riveting literary suspense.
On board the train to Malma Station are a married couple in crisis, a single dad and his young daughter, and a woman searching for the answer to a mystery her mother left behind. The enigmatic Harriet, the controlling Oskar, and the searching Yana—each of these characters carries within them the scars of what has come before.
From the acclaimed author of The Survivors, Alex Schulman’s Malma Station traces the crooked lines of family and history and shows how memories morph and take new shape. The novel makes the reader wonder if it the past we can change, rather than the future. With vivid prose, the narrative builds like a train hurtling through time, each chapter a separate car hooking into the next.
Malma Station is by turns an enchanting and gut-wrenching novel about family secrets and injustices passed on through generations and a suspenseful hunt for a truth with the power to change everything.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three passengers face unnerving uncertainties on a train ride through Sweden in this lyrical if overwrought psychological thriller from Schulman (The Survivors). Reeling from an ugly divorce, Harriet grapples with her desirability as she travels to Malma with her elderly father. Aboard the same train, meticulous, controlling Oskar struggles to save his foundering marriage, while young Yana sets out to discover the truth about her missing mother after finding a mysterious photo album among her deceased father's possessions. Through flashbacks, Schulman gradually reveals the points of connection between these characters, linking them in consistently surprising ways as the suspense mounts. Shrewd misdirection and sinewy prose ("She moves briskly through the narrow aisle, and he observes the gazes of those who catch sight of her for the first time. He always does that, even now he does it") set the novel up for success, but Schulman's ambition eventually outstrips his ability, and the plot devolves into a tangle of far-fetched misery. Though not without its virtues, this fails to stick the landing.
