Great fiction transports readers to new, wondrous places. The first stop in Rovshan Abdullaoglu’s THE MAN ON THE RAILS is a lonely railroad track in Saskatoon, Canada 2014, where Ted and Farouk are waiting to commit suicide by train. From this grim beginning unfolds a captivating and deeply moving story about the horrors of war, the triumph of the human spirit, and the healing power of love.

Ted is the first man on the rails, a writer lacking inspiration, haunted by the death of his brother on these railroad tracks years earlier. But Ted’s suicide is interrupted when Farouk shows up to end his own life. The men spend hours on the rails, waiting for the train to come, talking politics, religion, and philosophy. These discussions are the meat of THE MAN ON THE RAILS, soul-stirring conversations about the meaning of life, love, and literature. (Ted isn’t a Shakespeare fan.)

Farouk tells an absorbing story about a Serbian woman who falls in love with a Muslim man in the ancient Bosnian city of Mostar around the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia. The couple flees to the safety of Srebrenica only to get caught up in the real-life July 1995 massacre of ethnic Muslims. The woman is shipped off to an all-female concentration camp where she is raped, tortured and dehumanized by Serbian soldiers who were her neighbors only a few years earlier. She carries unnecessary shame and guilt around with her the rest of her life, even after she’s rescued, reunited with her husband, and gives birth to twins, one of whom is Farouk.

THE MAN ON THE RAILS bears similarities to Joshua Oppenheimer’s heartbreaking documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look Of Silence, which examine the aftermath of war atrocities in Indonesia. In both Bosnia and Indonesia, war criminals roam free today or currently hold positions of power, while victims and their families suffer in silence. War continues to tear nations and families apart, long after the guns have gone silent.

THE MAN ON THE RAILS is a powerful work. Rovshan Abdullaoglu writes with passion and grace with an impressive sense of detail and atmosphere in a modern novel crackling with ancient wisdom.

~Rob Errera for IndieReader