What happens when a writer can no longer write? What happens when pain is so intense that you question who you are and whether you can bare it any longer?

Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started.

For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear.

His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appears and, desperate, Oliver takes it.

For two years Oliver will watch others live their lives, observing the minutia and intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time.

Exquisitely written and bravely told, Train Lord is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your sense of self is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back.

Praise for Train Lord

“A highly intimate and emotional consideration of the relationship between pain, life, and the methods we use to escape both”

Adelaide Fringe

“Mol's writing is a revelation. Nuanced, at times dryly satirical or melancholy, it is always rich, poetic and intoxicating”

Bakehouse Studio