Days on the Night Train

For Millay Hyatt, it is the charm of ‘uncushioned encounters with the world’ that makes her, whenever possible, choose to travel by train. Days on the Night Train is a story of serendipities and missed connections, of sluggish border crossings, of embracing unpredictability and shunning the stifling regimentation of contemporary travel. In her accounts of her journeys across Europe and beyond, ranging from Edinburgh to Tunis, from Valencia to Tbilisi, Hyatt shows us that it is in movement that our perspective changes, and that this is never truer than when travelling by train, at half speed, with wide carriage windows framing a slowly shifting world. Inside, surrounded by strangers, she becomes intrigued by the intimate habits of her fellow passengers, listens in on arguing couples and bantering teenagers and gives her imagination free reign to speculate about their lives. Later, in a couchette, even sleep takes on an unfamiliar quality, echoing Proust’s comment that people on trains sleep like fish in the sea, gently rocked by the waves and currents. Travelling by rail brings Hyatt into contact with the world in a way that disturbs and upends her certainties. Perception slows and widens. Experiencing the excitement of departure and arrival – and in between the bittersweet joy of being in limbo, of looking inward – she notices how long train journeys, like books, can still alter us in a way jet travel has all but extinguished. Days on the Night Train is itself a journey, abundant with reflection, poetic observation, revealing encounter and literary excursions; it is a paean to travelling by train, to the variety of Europe’s landscape, and to an immersive way of approaching and seeing the world.