William and Sybille are a young couple who arrive in Berlin sometime at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. They move through the city, experience the vagaries of being in love and conceive a child but when a great disruption occurs they are forced to rely on each other in a world no longer recognisable, making them in turn strangers to one another. In The Trains of Europe we're introduced to a world without the ability to harness energy. Without electricity almost all aspects of life are seen anew, not least our ability to relate to one another - and our belief in progress. As the novel brings us out of a broken future toward a unified present, creating a puzzle for the reader to enjoy, we're introduced to three Norse deities. Their songs recount between the receding chapters how the development of train travel brought notions of progress and modernity, entropy and time's arrow, to a world hurtling toward catastrophe. Designed by Form & Konzept, the book has nine stamp illustrations by artist Adam Fearon.
