Against all expectations Marcel Feron has made a ';normal' life in a bucolic French suburb in the Ardennes. But on May 10, 1940, as Nazi tanks approach, this timid, happy man must abandon his home and confront the ';Fate' that he has secretly awaited. Separated from his pregnant wife and young daughter in the chaos of flight, he joins a freight car of refugees hurtling southward ahead of the pursuing invaders. There, he meets Anna, a sad-looking, dark- haired girl, whose accent is ';neither Belgian nor German,' and who ';seemed foreign to everything around her.' As the mystery of Anna's identity is gradually revealed, Marcel leaps from the heights of an exhilarating freedom to the depths of a terrifying responsibilityone that will lead him to a blood-chilling choice.When it first appeared in English in 1964, British novelist and critic Brigid Brophy declared The Train to be ';the novel his admirers had been expecting all along from Simenon.' Until The Train, she wrote, the dazzlingly prolific novelist had been ';a master without a masterpiece.'From the Trade Paperback edition.