A former train driver, Mattia Filice, has distilled nearly 20 years’ experience on the French railway network into a debut novel combining free verse and prose. The book, first published in France in 2023 and now available in an English translation by Jacques Houis, Driver (New York Review Books, £16.99), was reviewed yesterday in The Observer by Chris Power, who says it is “a remarkable achievement of tone, acknowledging the crap aspects of the work – the early mornings and late nights; the drab, harshly lit staff lounges in which bad meals are wolfed ahead of the next departure – as well as its nobility, such as when a veteran driver teaches the narrator how to brake without causing a single tremor in a cup of coffee on the console: “Thinking in particular about the people sleeping / on the first trains of the morning / You must not wake the people behind us, who worked through the night.”

Other reviews, I see, have appeared recently in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in The Masters Review, a platform for emerging writers.