Train Lord
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  • Published: 16 May 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241525081
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $24.99

Train Lord

The Astonishing True Story of One Man's Journey to Getting His Life Back On Track

Formats & editions
Paperback
16 May 2023
EBook
21 Jul 2022
Audiobook
21 Jul 2022
Tr. Paperback
2 Aug 2022
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An arresting memoir about a 10-month migraine, a recovery in Australia, and a job on the railway when there were no other options

Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly, Oliver began to disappear.

One evening, Oliver googled the only thing he could think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appeared. For two years Oliver watched others live their lives, observing the intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time.

Exquisitely written and bravely told, Train Lord is a searingly personal yet hugely relatable book, which asks what happens when your sense of self is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back.
  • Published: 16 May 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241525081
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Oliver Mol

Oliver Mol is the author of the critically acclaimed Lion Attack!. He was the inaugural winner of the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers as well as the recipient of an Australian Council Grant. In 2020, the stage show of Train Lord proved a runaway success during the Sydney Fringe Season. Oliver grew up dividing his time between Texas and Brisbane and now lives in Sydney.

Praise for Train Lord

A highly intimate and emotional consideration of the relationship between pain, life, and the methods we use to escape both

Adelaide Fringe

Mol's writing is a revelation. Nuanced, at times dryly satirical or melancholy, it is always rich, poetic and intoxicating

Bakehouse Studio

Mol's offbeat prose has a one-man performance quality to it . . . If Train Lord were a train, it would be a heritage line, an intimate preservation of a moment in time, full of personality

The Times

As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing

Heromag

Rude, raw, visceral, painful and wildly funny

Saga Magazine

Entertaining, moving and vivid... its playfulness is irrepressible

The Conversation

Like his alt-lit forebears, Oliver Mol's writing can often feel like alchemy, constructing brief, glimmering moments of catharsis from the meandering absurdities of life

Guardian, 'Best Australian Books of 2022'
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