The Train Was on Time
  • Published: 16 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241370384
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $26.00

The Train Was on Time

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Paperback
16 Apr 2019
EBook
31 Jan 2019
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A hauntingly beautiful tale about a young German soldier, from a Nobel Prize-winning author, introduced by Anna Funder

Twenty-four-year-old Andreas, a disillusioned German soldier, is travelling on a troop train to the Eastern Front when he has an awful premonition that he will die in exactly five days. As he hurtles towards his death, he reflects on the chaos around him - the naïve soldiers, the painfully thin girl who pours his coffee, the ruined countryside - with sudden, heart-breaking poignancy.

Arriving in Poland the night before he is certain he will die, he meets Olina, a beautiful prostitute, and together they attempt to escape his fate. . .
  • Published: 16 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241370384
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

Heinrich Boll

Heinrich Böll was one of the trio of great German writers (along with Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse) who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Böll was born in Cologne in 1917 and brought up in a liberal Catholic pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experience as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-past Nine, Children are Civilians Too, Group Portrait with Lady, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, And Never Said a Word and The Safety Net. Böll served for several years as president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in 1985.

portrait photo of Heinrich Boll

Also by Heinrich Boll

Group Portrait With Lady
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Women In A River Landscape
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
See all

Praise for The Train Was on Time

His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection

Daily Telegraph

Böll combines a mammoth intelligence with a literary outlook that is masterful and unique

Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22

My most-admired contemporary novelist

John Ashbery

We must be grateful to the Penguin European Writers series, a precious venture in these dark times

John Banville

From the moment I stepped on board the troop train with Private Andreas, concerns pertaining to my own world fell away completely. Holding this impelling book is tantamount to holding the young soldier's fate in one's hands. It is impossible to let go.

Claire-Louise Bennett, author of 'Pond'

Böll's novel blows a stent in the human heart, and shows us the terror there. It feels more necessary than ever

Anna Funder, from the introduction

This is the best book I have read this year; not by miles, but by whole astronomical units; I am stunned by it as if by a blow. It is *astonishing* to the extent that I cannot convey to you its power - how gradually one lies clutching the book wrenched into pieces by the imagery and by the extravagant profundity with which the soldier's fear and desire and unhappiness is felt...

Sarah Perry, bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth