In order to become engrossed in Louise Doughty’s latest novel, the reader really does have to suspend disbelief! The narrator is Lisa Evans, a former secondary school teacher and partner of Dr Matthew Goodison, who appears to have committed suicide at Peterborough station. Aimless and stuck in an afterlife hinterland that isn’t exactly purgatory, she begins to remember what brought her to this place and how and why she died. As she travels round her home town we are introduced to others who have suffered and some who feel that the reason for her death needs further exploration.
This is a novel about polar opposites: love and hate. Lisa learns that only love can set her free and, in doing so, begins to understand what real love looks like as she listens in on the lives of the railway staff, the police, her friends and her parents. The hatred comes in the form of her partner. Appearing as a caring, able, devoted doctor, he is actually a cruel abuser who moves from coercive control to physical abuse over the course of the story. Lisa recognises what he is and yet finds the prospect of confronting his behaviour terrifying. Doughty depicts the roller-coaster ride of emotions felt by Lisa very convincingly. ‘Just walk out of that door NOW!’ we feel like shouting, whilst understanding that it’s almost impossible for her to do so.
By the end of the novel Lisa has realised that, even though she now survives in spirit form, ‘…to the people who cared for me, I exist, living on in their hearts. I am not alone. I never was.’ And the author is brave enough to allow the story to carry some grim truths too: the guilty do not always receive their just desserts.
Whilst the author gives us credible characters and domestic situations and captures the ordinariness of everyday Peterborough effectively, ‘Platform Seven’ suffers a little from its ghost story format which distracts from the important issues focused on. No new insights on the human heart but, as ever with Doughty, a story well told.
My thanks to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

I’ve read several books by Louise Doughty and liked them all but I thought this one was breathtakingly good and arguably her best book yet. I couldn’t put it down and was gripped from the start in this twisty tale. . I don’t want to say much about the plot as it would spoil it for future readers so suffice it to say it concerns what happened to Lisa Evans at Peterborough station. The atmosphere in the book was fantastic throughout and you could picture the action on Platform 7 and elsewhere. The book gave me so many different emotions from intrigue to empathy to shock and anger. The tension was released through little flashes of humour which I appreciated. There was a real hint of menace at times which was almost palpable. The characters were easy to picture and most of them were very likeable and sympathetic with the exception of Matt. This book showed how one event can set off a chain reaction which led to disaster. There were several themes - control and possession, love and loss, abuse and learning to recover, anger and helplessness. The ending was good and I liked the optimistic way the novel finished. It’s an unusual and daring idea to set a story in and around a station but it so worked. The author captured the hustle and bustle but also that stations can be the scene of tragedy in this superbly different story. Highly recommended.

A real unsettling read, dark and twisty with a slightly different spin to the usual novels of this genre. I really enjoyed it and raced through it, wanting to know more. Thank you for the chance to review.

An intriguing mix of psychological thriller and ghost story - and much more.
It begins with details of the late night/early morning events at a railway station in eastern England and the staff who work there. At 4 on a freezing November morning, Peterborough Railway Station is deserted. An unseen narrator, whose name we learn later is Lisa, notes the appearance of an elderly man who is sitting on a bench at the far end of Platform 7. Lisa knows what the man is thinking, but she is powerless to save him. Soon afterwards, he walks to edge of the platform and, as a goods train thunders through the station, he falls on to the tracks.
What follows is an almost mundane account of the aftermath of this man's suicide as various members of staff try to cope with what has happened. It is particularly harrowing for Dalmar, an immigrant working at the station, who saw the man and yelled a warning just before he jumped. There's a seriously grim description of the clean-up crew removing the pieces of the body from the railway line which has a particularly unsettling effect on a young police officer, PC Lockhart.
This is the 2nd death on Platform Seven in 18 months and Lisa was the first of the two who died. She feels these deaths are somehow connected.
Lisa is our "spirit guide" throughout this book. Through her we eavesdrop on conversations and even the thoughts of various characters, especially a young man called Caleb on whom she becomes fixated. Gradually, we learn more about Lisa, her former life and the reason she is trapped in Peterborough Railway Station. As she makes desperate attempts to communicate with the living, there's a dramatic change in her circumstances. This is a dark, unsettling read in places but also an uplifting, almost spiritual tale which will ultimately reward the reader.

Many thanks to Faber & Faber and NetGalley for a copy of this book in return for an unbiased review.

In Platform Seven, Louise Doughty continues to showcase her versatility as a writer (her two previous novels, Apple Tree Yard and Black Water, were both very different and very good) by framing a familiar psychological thriller narrative with something more unsettling. Since her death, Lisa Evans has been confined to the boundaries of Peterborough Railway Station, unable to do anything but observe its staff and commuters and occasionally encounter others of her kind - from the man who killed himself on Platform Seven to the 'malign presence' that inhabits the multi-storey car park across the road. At first, Lisa cannot remember what happened to her, but gradually it all starts coming back...

This could have felt like an awkward sandwich of ghost story and thriller, but Doughty pulls it off by making the whole text feel a little haunted; even when Lisa is alive, her absence seizures detach her from her body and give her a certain distance on her own life. She also uses Lisa's omniscient narration to portray normal lives interlinked in a way that is reminiscent of Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, and has the same uplifting quality. Doughty writes in her acknowledgments that she'd like to thank the station staff 'despite their understandable bafflement that anyone should want to write a novel set on Peterborough Railway Station.' However, her choice of setting is wise; the banality of Peterborough works well with her exploration of ordinary kindness and ordinary estrangement in a way that a more evocative setting would not have done. The middle section of this novel, which is undoubtedly the most gripping but also the least original, is lifted above a typical thriller by the quality of Doughty's writing and the way in which she explores the deeper context of Lisa's life and death.

Platform Seven is a wonderful literary thriller, and the only reason I haven't given it a higher rating was because of the ending, which I felt spelt out the 'message' of the book too clearly; Doughty had already effectively conveyed everything she needed to say in the previous chapters. Nevertheless, I'd recommend this to both old fans and new.

While this doesn't have the immediate compulsive grab of Doughty's [book:Apple Tree Yard|17452179], it ends up being a more mature book by the end. Do stick with it, though - I found the first 25-30% hard going and difficult to pick up the tail of the narrative: but by the time Lisa starts telling her own story of her life with Matty, I was hooked.

There are definite shades of [book:Into the Darkest Corner|15818362] and [book:Killing Me Softly|6342370], and a strength is Doughty's forensic application of detail and specificity as Lisa's fairy-tale romance starts to drip-feed unease before turning down some dark routes.

It's only gradually that the range of characters introduced at the start begin to make sense - and I love the way Doughty balances a troubling vision with something more life enhancing and positive. A page-turner, then, that also deals intelligently with emotive and important topics.