Used Books Online: Night Train to Lisbon

In the Night Train to Lisbon, Raimund Gregorius does what everybody has thought of doing at some point but dared not do - he left his life behind, and took off on a train to Lisbon after a chance encounter with a women who mesmerized him with her "fabulously soft, southern voice, that sounded like an endless hesitant drawl that drew you in merely by hearing it.

It was not that his life in Bern was particularly bad; it was also not a notion that he had entertained before - but for once in his life, he decided to do something different. He decided to just leave, and see what was in store for him.

From there on, the story is told with a dreamlike quality, as Gregorius attempts to translate a certain Dr. Amadeu de Prado’s autobiography to "tracks down the people it describes, piecing together Prado’s story: his aristocratic but unhappy childhood, his intensity and discipline as a young scholar, his rigid moral code, and his participation in the resistance movement against Portugal’s right-wing dictator, Salazar. The more facts he uncovers about Prado, the more he hopes to achieve an intimate understanding of what it was like to be Prado. Yet his actual discoveries are the insignificance of the facts of his own life and a greater awareness of what it is like to be himself."

The twin romantic notions of uprooting one's life for the unknow, and travel and discovery in this bestselling novel by Pascal Mercier produces an irresistible mix that is as "mesmerizing and dreamlike as a Wong Kar-wai film".