People often ask me if I’m writing about the books as I read them in real-time. The answer is: sometimes. Most of the time I remember the books so well that I don’t need to read them again to write about them. Sometimes, I think I remember a title that well but then have to pull it off the shelf to look up something crucial, get sucked in and end up reading the whole dang thing again. I mean, I am working full-time, as well as writing this blog and I can’t be reading all the time.

Except this week. This week, I am on vacation and reading and re-reading books on the nook app on my phone. So I am writing in real-time – or practically real time. Earlier this week I read two books and wrote about them. Those posted Saturday and Sunday. Now I’m going to write about the two books I downloaded and read yesterday and write about them for Monday and Tuesday (when I’ll be traveling and recovering from traveling). I’ll probably download a bunch of books to read on the plane and write about those on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Today’s book is about traveling. I read about it – gosh, where did I read about it? The NYT? A listicle of new books? Oh, who knows. Yesterday I wrote about a first novel that I had discovered online that started out promisingly and went downhill from there. This is also a first novel.

And it’s frigging awesome!

The first chapter opens in a train station in China, in an alternate late 1800s, as passengers are waiting to board the Trans-Siberian Express. This train travels non-stop from China to Russia and then, a few months later, back again. Non-stop because everything in between has… well… undergone a “change.” It started morphing into something else and anyone who didn’t get out also underwent a change and is no longer really human. So The Company (owners of the Trans-Siberian Express), built huge walls to isolate the places in between, and protect Civilization from changing.

As described in the only guidebook written about the train, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, taking the train is an adventure not for the faint-hearted. Things on the train are never completely safe, the Wastelands just on the other side of a pane of glass and reinforced walls, and wanting in, to change the train. The Company takes great pains to ensure that the passengers – and especially the train – are safe: armed guards man observation towers in the Captain’s car against creatures from the Wastelands, and, if a guest should become infected by the Wastelands just by gazing out the window at the wrong time and disappearing into daydreams, they will be forcibly isolated until recovery. Stowaways, who cannot be monitored for changes by the train’s crew, are therefore treated harshly, ejected into the Wastelands where they become consumed. The Captain is strict; her crew, loyal; the Crows – the Company men who spy on crew and passengers alike – ever-present, searching vainly for Artemis, the underground reporter whose stories they don’t appreciate but cannot seem to stop.

In the past, the train’s journeys have been mostly safe. But on the most recent passage, something happened – something the crew can’t talk about, mainly because they don’t remember. Now the train is setting off for what might become its last journey. The passengers are a motley lot: a young woman whose name is a lie; an ancient countess with a penchant for causing trouble and her loyal servant; a newly-married couple whose life, one starts to suspect, is turning out to be no honeymoon; two professors, one trying to prove his crowing theory and reclaim his status and reputation at any cost, the other enjoying one last third-class journey before retiring. The Captain’s crew includes a cartographer of the Wastelands with a terrible secret, a Chief Steward on the take, and an orphan who was born on and grew up on the train, learning all its secrets.

Until she finds one last secret. A girl her age. A stowaway.

And their journey goes off the rails.

This is an amazing book, cleverly and poetically written, with a compelling can’t-put-it-down plot, fascinating and distinctive characters, and a setting that draws you in. The train feels like the Orient Express and the passing Wastelands like the romantic views that you see while traveling by train, safely distanced by your window. Until it doesn’t.

This is one I will read again and again, discovering something new each time I do, like one does when taking the same journey over and over again.