Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Driver

Driver

Houis, Jacques
Filice, Mattia

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.95

ISBN10: 1681379880
ISBN13: 9781681379883
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Oct 21 2025
Pages: 368
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
A bracing novel of work, labor, and collective action, this vibrantly written debut is narrated by a man who runs a high-speed train in France--a story born out of the author's experience as a real-life train driver.

Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails--packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond--Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.

Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work.

Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.

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