Announcing Louise Doughty’s ninth novel

Faber & Faber will publish Platform Seven by bestselling author of Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty, on 22 August 2019.

Louisa Joyner, Editorial Director, bought World All Languages rights from Antony Harwood at Antony Harwood Limited.

Platform Seven is a gripping, brilliant, original and eerily-timely novel.

Platform Seven at 4am: Peterborough Railway Station is deserted. The man crossing the covered walkway on this freezing November morning is confident he’s alone. As he sits on the metal bench at the far end of the platform it is clear his choice is strategic – he’s as far away from the night staff as he can get.

What the man doesn’t realise is that he has company. Lisa Evans knows what he has decided. She knows what he is about to do as she tries and fails to stop him walking to the platform edge.

Two deaths on Platform Seven. Two fatalities in eighteen months – surely they’re connected?

No one is more desperate to understand what connects them than Lisa Evans herself. After all, she was the first of the two to die…

Louisa Joyner, Editorial Director, said: ‘I remember finishing Apple Tree Yard by a pool in Greece and thinking “How did Louise Doughty create a novel that is both utterly gripping with a protagonist so perfectly-realised, Dr Yvonne Charmicheal feels like a friend of a friend.” In Platform Seven she takes that wisdom and heart and blends it with a story readers will be glued to, and talking about, in their thousands. Lisa Evans’s story is as resonant as it is unputdownable.’

Platform Seven is Louise Doughty’s ninth novel.  Her most recent book was Black Water, which was published in 2016 to critical acclaim in the UK and US, where it was nominated as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her Top Ten bestseller Apple Tree Yard sold over half a million copies in the UK alone and was adapted for BBC One as a four-part series starring Emily Watson. She has been nominated for the Orange Prize for fiction and the Costa Novel award and her work has been translated into thirty languages.  She lives in London.