What's your reading of the fact that the supposedly impenetrable train is infiltrated by the Wastelands? How are windows and glass important to that, and what is glass a metaphor for?

Beyond the effects of the Wastelands, how do the characters change throughout the book? Which progress, which regress? How do the character's goals and relationships change through the book?

How does the transformation of the train itself reflect the transformation of the people within it?

• names vs titles covered in another question.
• human-occupied land and the Wastelands
• inside and outside the train
• First and Third class
• passenger and crew
• Weiwei and the rest of the crew
• honesty and deception, lie and truth
• science and religion
• hubris and humility

What others are there? Which are important? How are these dichotomies addressed in the book? Which are resolved and which remain?

Is the notion of "dichotomy" central to the book?

• nature, perhaps including the Gaia hypothesis, and are a metaphor for ecological collapse and us making our environment unlivable
• disease and pandemic, where outsiders are deadly and the only safe space is in your "bubble"
• the collapse of colonialism, maybe specifically the Russification of Asia. Colonised areas are reverting to their "uncivilised" and unknowable form
• life, and the novel is a Bildungsroman. The train represents childhood, and the story is how the inhabitants transition from the controlled, safe environment to the uncontrolled wider world.

What other things could the Wastelands stand for? Which, if any, do you think are the author's intendend readings? Which, if any, do you think are useful readings?

What do you make of the description of the Exhibition on p. 360:

row upon row of tall glass cases stretch out as far as she can see. In some ther are lifeless creatures, eyes unseeing. In some there are things the climb or crawl or fly, bumping furred bodies against the glass. This is what the Exhibition is saying -- Look at our achievements, look at what we have made. Then look at what we are not.

There's also the communities that form on the train. The crew look out for each other, the passengers form communities in First and Third classes.

Which of these Relationships stuck out for you? Which were important for the story? What's your opinion on whether events were driven by relationships rather than personal, internal drives?

What about all the relationships between things in the Wastelands? How is Elena's changing connection to the Wastelands important, and how does it affect her?

Consider the quote “The train must run. That is the only truth that matters. Not who is destroyed along the way.” At what points in the novel does this idea feel particularly true? What does this quote say about the morals of the book and the characters aboard the train?

A couple of things I noticed were that the book was told in the present tense, and the chapters got shorter as the book progressed and the action intensified. Did these elements help or hinder?

What would it mean, in either case?

Do you agree that these three viewpoints share the characteristics that Brooks gives them? Is science always reductionist? Is religion always reactionary? Is direct experience always superior?

How much are people defined by their name or their role? Are they different people when they have different references (is Suzuki the same as the Cartographer? is Marya Petrovna the same as Marya Antonova?) How do the different names change how people relate to each other? How do different names change the characters themselves?

But with the division set up, the author mostly ignores Third Class, treating them as a mass of people with a few exceptions (notably the Professor). Most of the attention in the book is in First class and the crew.

How do these class divisions influence the story?

What does this say about contemporary society? Are class divisions still important?

(The lack of second class is probably a reference to historic class divisions on British railways, that had First and Third before Third was renamed Standard.)

Sarah Brooks won the Lucy Cavendish Prize in 2019. She works in East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds where she also helps run the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She has a PhD on monsters in classical Chinese ghost stories. She is also co-editor of Samovar, a bilingual online magazine for translated speculative fiction. Originally from Lancashire, she now lives in Leeds. Her novel The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands comes out in June 2024 from Weidenfeld and Nicolson (UK) and Flatiron Books (US).

'Imagine a crossover between Murder on the Orient Express, Game of Thrones and Paradise Lost . . . Brooks has serious talent' SUNDAY TIMES

'I was completely transported by this book . . . I urge everybody to pick up a copy' STUART TURTON

'Breathtaking . . . Abounding with mysteries and marvels' SAMANTHA SHANNON

'Exceptional. Strange, addictive, immersive, it's a steampunk Piranesi meets His Dark Materials' JENNIE GODFREY

'Mysterious and clever and brilliant' NATASHA PULLEY

It is said there is a price that every passenger must pay. A price beyond the cost of a ticket.

It is the end of the nineteenth century and the world is awash with marvels. But there is nothing so marvellous as the Wastelands: a terrain of terrible miracles that lies between Beijing and Moscow.

Nothing touches the Wastelands except the Great Trans-Siberian Express: an impenetrable train built to carry cargo across continents, but which now transports anyone who dares.

Onto the platform steps a curious cast of characters: Marya, a grieving woman with a borrowed name; Weiwei, a famous child born on the train; and Henry Grey, a disgraced naturalist.

But there are whispers that the train isn't safe. As secrets and stories begin to unravel, the passengers and crew must survive their journey together, even as something uncontrollable seems to be breaking in . . .