Train Lord

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The astonishing true story of trust, pain, becoming lost, and finding a way back to yourself despite it all.

What happens when a writer can no longer write? What happens when pain is so intense that you question who you are and whether you can bare it any longer?

Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started.

For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who could no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear.

His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appears and, desperate, Oliver takes it.

For two years Oliver will watch others live their lives, observing the minutia and intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time.

Exquisitely written and bravely told, Train Lord is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your sense of self is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back.

© Oliver Mol 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • Mol’s offbeat prose has a one-man performance quality to it . . . If Train Lord were a train, it would be a heritage line, an intimate preservation of a moment in time, full of personality

    The Times

  • As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing

    Heromag

  • Rude, raw, visceral, painful and wildly funny

    Saga Magazine

  • A highly intimate and emotional consideration of the relationship between pain, life, and the methods we use to escape both

    Adelaide Fringe

  • Mol’s writing is a revelation. Nuanced, at times dryly satirical or melancholy, it is always rich, poetic and intoxicating

    Bakehouse Studio

  • Like his alt-lit forebears, Oliver Mol’s writing can often feel like alchemy, constructing brief, glimmering moments of catharsis from the meandering absurdities of life

    Guardian, 'Best Australian Books of 2022'

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