Driver

<b>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.</b><br><br><i>Driver</i> 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—<i>Driver </i>takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in <i>Moby-Dick, </i>a microcosm of the world at large.<br><br>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.<br><br>Unsentimental yet full of feeling, <i>Driver </i>is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.