A Slow Fire Burning: new thriller from The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins announced

Five years ago, Paula Hawkins’ debut The Girl on the Train became one of the Top 5 best-selling hardback novels since records began. Paula’s 2017 novel, Into the Water, topped the Sunday Times bestseller chart for six weeks. Next year, she returns with a third book, A Slow Fire Burning, which looks into the how a life can be derailed by decisions made decades before.

A Slow Fire Burning will be released on 31 August, 2021. Following Laura, a likely suspect in a brutal murder case that takes place on a London canal boat, A Slow Fire Burning will dig deeper into the events that make a criminal life.

Hawkins said: “what I wanted to explore in this book is the way that no tragedy happens in isolation: an accident in childhood can have ramifications a decade later; trusting the wrong person at the wrong time can derail a life completely.

“I am interested in the way we become the people we are: how we choose what to hold onto and how those things can wound us.”

A Slow Fire Burning contains “everything readers could possibly want from a Paula Hawkins thriller – a dark plot that grabs you and never lets up, characters that you believe in utterly, incredible pace and knock-you-sideways twists,” says its publisher, Transworld’s Sarah Adams. “Paula skilfully balances delicious touches of sharp, knowing humour with deeply affecting storytelling, so that we are powerfully enthralled from first page to last gasp.”