Orient Express

With his second novel, Orient Express, Graham Greene set out to write a popular novel that would make a lot of money. He succeeded. The story is a thriller that takes place on a passenger train travelling from Ostend (Belgium) to Constantinople, a setting that Greene uses to bring together a diverse group of characters: a wealthy businessman, an escaped communist revolutionary, a female investigative journalist, a lower-class couple on a group tour, and a career criminal on the run. The book is thrilling, full of entertaining chase sequences, anxious border crossings, arrests, and interrogations. But what makes it more than a conventional thriller is the way Greene shifts narrative perspectives over the course of the novel to create rich, flawed and multi-layered characters.