Train Dreams

Denis Johnson
Paperback
128 pages

Robert Grainier is a day labourer in the American West, felling the trees that feed the railways. It is the start of the twentieth century, and the world is changing at a rapid pace.

Life is fragile in the wilds of the frontier; disease and forest fires are rife. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainier journeys, struggling to make sense of the bewildering changes transforming the nation. Rich and muscular, sweeping and incantatory, Train Dreams is an epic in miniature: an elegy to the ravaged beauty of a lost landscape, and a haunting indictment of the cost of our modern way of life.