The Girl On The Train - Paula Hawkins - Questions

Here are the questions for this months book club:

The chapters alternate between the three narrators – Rachel, Megan and Anna – and move back and forth in time. How did this structure help to maintain the twist and the secrets? How did you find this added to the suspense and intrigue?


At the end of the book everything is revealed to the reader, and the characters explained. Did it change how you felt about Rachel? Or Megan? Did it affect the way you thought about all of the events leading up to this moment?


A crucial question in The Girl on the Train is how much Rachel Watson can trust her own memory. How reliable are her observations? Yet since the relationship between truth and memory is often a slippery one, how objective or "true" can a memory, by definition, really be? Can memory lie? If so, what factors might influence it? Consider examples from the book.


Other characters in the novel make different assumptions about Rachel Watson depending on how or even where they see her. To a certain extent, she understands this and often tries to manipulate their assumptions—by appearing to be a commuter, for instance, going to work every day. Is she successful? To what degree did you make assumptions about Rachel early on based on the facts and appearances you were presented? How did those change over time and why? How did your assumptions about her affect your reading of the central mystery in the book? Did your assumptions about her change over its course? What other characters did you make assumptions about? How did your assumptions affect your interpretation of the plot? Having now finished The Girl on the Train, what surprised you the most?