Synopses & Reviews
"The purser took the last landing-card in his hand and watched the passengers cross the wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks."
As the Orient Express hurtles across Europe on its three-day journey from Ostend to Constantinople, the driven lives of several of its passengers become bound together in a fateful interlock. The menagerie of characters include Coral Musker, a beautiful chorus girl; Carleton Myatt, a rich Jewish businessman; Richard John, a mysterious and kind doctor returning to his native Belgrade; the spiteful journalist Mabel Warren; and Josef Grunlich, a cunning, murderous burglar.
What happens to these strangers as they put on and take off their masks of identity and passion, all the while confessing, prevaricating, and reaching out to one another in the "veracious air" of the onrushing train, makes for one of Graham Greene's most exciting and suspenseful stories. Originally published in 1933, Orient Express was Greene's first major success. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition features a new introductory essay by Christopher Hitchens.
Review
"No serious writer of [the twentieth century] has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene." Time
Review
"A tour de force....The realist and romantic struggle with each other in this book, making it kind of a mental battlefield, inducing a sense of breathlessness and urgency. It is a very remarkable piece of work, splendidly written, exciting, disturbing." L. P. Hartley
Review
"Mr. Greene's gift for spirited storytelling provides, in addition to excellent entertainment, moments of unexpected power and reality." The New Republic
Review
"Orient Express has movement, variety, interest: taken on the surface, it is an interesting and entertaining story of adventure, penetrated through and through with the consciousness of the onrushing train, with that curious sense of the temporary suspension of one's ordinary existence which comes to many on ship or train." The New York Times
Review
"One of THE most exciting and successful novels of its type that I have read." Saturday Review of Literature
Synopsis
As the Orient Express hurtles across Europe on its three-day journey from Ostend to Constantinople, the driven lives of several of its passengers become bound together in a fateful interlock. The menagerie of characters include Coral Musker, a beautiful chorus girl; Carleton Myatt, a rich Jewish businessman; Richard John, a mysterious and kind doctor returning to his native Belgrade; the spiteful journalist Mabel Warren; and Josef Grunlich, a cunning, murderous burglar.
What happens to these strangers as they put on and take off their masks of identity and passion, all the while confessing, prevaricating, and reaching out to one another in the "veracious air" of the onrushing train, makes for one of Graham Greene's most exciting and suspenseful stories. Originally published in 1933, Orient Express was Greene's first major success.
About the Author
Graham Greene (19041991) worked as a journalist and critic, and was later employed by the foreign office. His many books include
The Power and the Glory,
The Third Man,
Our Man in Havana,
The Comedians, and
Travels with My Aunt. He is the subject of an acclaimed three-volume biography by Norman Sherry.
Christopher Hitchens is a widely published polemicist and frequent radio and TV commentator. He is the author of many books, including Why Orwell Matters, Letters to a Young Contrarian, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger, as well as books on Cyprus, Kurdistan and Palestine, including Blaming the Victims, coedited with Edward Said. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and writes for, among others, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review, and The Washington Post. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.