Raising Steam

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER Everybody wanted the railway close, oh yes please, but not so close that they could hear it or smell it It s only in dictatorships that the trains run on time. Everywhere else, signal failures, leaves on the line, the wrong type of snow and the wrong type of sunlight make departure and arrival times just a nice, idealistic theory. So when it becomes a matter of life and death to get a train somewhere on time, the odds don t look good especially if that somewhere is a completely new destination. The only thing that upsets people more than railway delays, after all, is building more railway. Past their back gardens. And some of those people will go to extremes to stop locomotion in its tracks British fiction s most brilliant satire on contemporary life Telegraph The most serious of comedies, the most relevant and real of fantasies at once hilariously cynical and idealistically practical Independent