‘I do feel the strongest urge to talk,’ confides the narrator when a chance meeting with the beautiful Olivia after more than 30 years brings back disturbing memories of what she tells us is ‘a terrible story’. The encounter takes place in Bordeaux where Kate, American, is sightseeing while her English husband attends a conference, and for reasons which we shall eventually learn it threatens to shatter her orderly life. What she wants is an impartial ‘stranger on a train’ to tell her story to, and we are it — sitting, in Kate’s imagination, in a warm carriage crossing the Russian steppes, waiting for the approach of the samovar and little sticky cakes. The device is not intrusive but ensures that the story, although it involves lurid scandal, a tragic death and much philosophical speculation, is told in a light, intimate tone of voice: well-behaved, well-educated, self-deprecating and eager like its owner.
It all begins in the 1950s at the exclusive Sweet Briar College in Virginia with the arrival of the cosmopolitan and aloofly glamorous Olivia — packed off by her parents, it is rumoured, to escape a fortune-hunter.
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