Train Lord, Oliver Mol
Train Lord, Oliver Mol
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Train Lord
The Astonishing True Story of One Man's Journey to Getting His Life Back On Track

Author: Oliver Mol

Narrator: Oliver Mol

Unabridged: 7 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Michael Joseph

Published: 07/21/2022


Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

The astonishing true story of trust, pain, becoming lost, and finding a way back to yourself despite it all.

What happens when a writer can no longer write? What happens when pain is so intense that you question who you are and whether you can bare it any longer?

Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started.

For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who could no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear.

His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appears and, desperate, Oliver takes it.

For two years Oliver will watch others live their lives, observing the minutia and intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time.

Exquisitely written and bravely told, Train Lord is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your sense of self is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back.

© Oliver Mol 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ellie on August 11, 2022

Sometimes you manage to find a book that truly speaks to your soul. The kind of book that you can’t imagine having lived without reading. This was that book for me. Train Lord is a memoir. The author’s life was drastically changed by chronic pain. He manages to get a job working on trains and eventua......more

Goodreads review by Rob on August 27, 2022

What an annoying book. The frustrating thing is he writes quite well and it could have been an interesting account of his time on the trains in Sydney. Instead, it's a sprawling, repetitive account of his "migraine" that jumps back and forwards in time. Every time you think that's it and he's going......more

Goodreads review by Emma book blogger on July 25, 2022

Oliver Mol open up about how he suffered 10 long months with migraines. How he got through it and how he struggled with them. Amazing story. The story does not flow in order goes back and forth but this does not seem to matter because you can keep up . I thought his reading style was really easy to......more

Goodreads review by Edi on August 20, 2022

beautifully written, raw and funny. I loved this book so much.......more

Goodreads review by Darcy on September 07, 2022

This book has both moved and educated me and I feel grateful to have read it. I considered myself naive about the experience of chronic pain before reading this moving and hilarious memoir. However the literary skills used by Mol made the experience feel both close and human. While the book had me g......more


Quotes

Mol's offbeat prose has a one-man performance quality to it . . . If Train Lord were a train, it would be a heritage line, an intimate preservation of a moment in time, full of personality The Times

As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing Heromag

Rude, raw, visceral, painful and wildly funny Saga Magazine

A highly intimate and emotional consideration of the relationship between pain, life, and the methods we use to escape both Adelaide Fringe

Mol's writing is a revelation. Nuanced, at times dryly satirical or melancholy, it is always rich, poetic and intoxicating Bakehouse Studio

Like his alt-lit forebears, Oliver Mol's writing can often feel like alchemy, constructing brief, glimmering moments of catharsis from the meandering absurdities of life Guardian, 'Best Australian Books of 2022'

Entertaining, moving and vivid... its playfulness is irrepressible The Conversation

A highly intimate and emotional consideration of the relationship between pain, life, and the methods we use to escape both ADELAIDE FRINGE

Mol's writing is a revelation. Nuanced, at times dryly satirical or melancholy, it is always rich, poetic and intoxicating Bakehouse Studio