But it just took off and had a momentum of its own which I do not understand. My agent and my publisher were really excited they did a great publicity campaign and we were hopeful. Q: Could you ever in a thousand years have imagined how big The Girl on the Train ended up becoming?Ī: No, to put it bluntly, no. They draw certain sorts of people to them … In some ways it's reminiscent of Agatha Christie, a small place where everyone has secrets and everyone has a motive to do something. It’s isolated, a good place for lots of crimes to happen.Ī: It’s a small community, it’s a bit isolated, it has in my book a very dark history. I wanted to build up a kind of Gothic, creepy feeling to this place … it’s a place around which myths have built and stories are told, and I think places like that start to take on their own personality and they start to develop a power of their own. Q: Tell us about the fictional town of Beckford in your new novel. I know a few characters and I know the ending and everything else kind of happens.

I have to know whodunit and why, but then everything else gets built in between during the writing. I don’t have it all pictured in my head at the beginning …You have to leave some gaps for things to emerge spontaneously that’s how I like to write. The story starts to build while I’m in the writing. Q: How did you decide to write this story and where did it come from?Ī: I start with the characters and then I ask myself questions about why they are where they are and how they got there. I tend to keep my working titles, and the working title of this was Into the Water. I was never going to use “Girl” again, there was never any question of that. Q: No Girl title this time! Was that a conscious choice?Ī: Yes.

She’s back with a new novel, Into the Water(Riverhead), about a riverside town in England where too many women have died mysteriously in the river's “Drowning Pool.” Hawkins spoke with USA TODAY’s Jocelyn McClurg and took fan questions on Facebook Live as part of the #BookmarkThis series. British author Paula Hawkins seemed to come out of nowhere to wow the world with her mega-selling 2015 psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train.

Into the water hawkins