The Passengers: A near-future thriller with a killer twist

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OMG this book is absolutely brilliant! How have I not read a John Marrs book before this? Where has this author been all my life?! Seriously this book had me at the edge of my seat the entire wild ride. And….aren’t some of us doing that today? Just trying to survive?— the health war we find ourselves in — the day to day realities- One of the reasons I'm drawn to everything that John Marrs writes is that he takes the mundane and gives it a soapy spin. I mean this as the highest of compliments, because there's nothing I adore more than a unique idea that's brimming with drama, and I like for my psychological thrillers to contain not only the traditional aspects of crime fiction, but also the secrets hidden by our characters that pertain to their daily lives. I was slightly worried going into this one that the overwhelmingly large cast of characters would cause me to lose focus, but I should have known better than to not implicitly trust that the author knew exactly what he was doing. Hoe moet ik het allemaal voor elkaar krijgen, dacht hij wanhopig. Mijn verstand zegt dat ik zelfmoord moet plegen. Maar ik wil leven! Ondanks alles wil ik leven! Daar heb je al je verstand voor nodig, maar dat kan het niet aan, het keert zich tegen me. Het ontkent mijn bestaan. Wat moet ik er dan mee? Omdat ik het begrijp, dacht hij ongelukkig, daarom word ik wanhopig. Ach, begreep ik het maar verkeerd! Dat kan helaas niet meer. Behalve de lijst van mijn verliezen bezit ik niets meer, echt helemaal niets." Writing/Prose: Well-written, engrossing, intelligent, masterly, absorbing, compelling, and compulsively readable.

The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz | Goodreads The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz | Goodreads

I'd like to thank Netgalley, Penguin Random House UK – Ebury Publishing, and John Marrs for the e-ARC. Quite Kafkaesque, the surreal circumstances he finds himself in all but completely wears him down in a matter of days and his struggles are painful to follow. In fact, between the problem of drivers still talking or texting on cell phones (despite it now being against the law), impairment (both legal and illegal), wrong way driving accidents, and road rage...these cars have proven to be safer than those driven by humans...

The One has been translated into 30 different languages and is to be turned into an eight-part Netflix series starting in autumn 2020. Picture this, it's a day and age where AI control cars and you don't need drivers or to drive yourself.

The Passengers by Will Ashon review – voices of a nation The Passengers by Will Ashon review – voices of a nation

The story about this ‘lost/re-discovered’ novel and the life and death of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz - who died at age 23 - along with 361 others passengers who also died - while on a troopship that was torpedoed by a German submarine ……is a fascinating- bleak -sad story of its own The passengers speak for themselves and tells the jurors and the public why they should be saved and they have lots of secrets about their pasts. All of the jurors are different. There is an illegal immigrant, a T.V. Star, a suicidal man, an abused wife fleeing her husband, a disabled war hero, a pregnant woman, and parents of two kids, Ik was huiverig te lachen om de zelfspot en dit boek spannend te noemen om de duistere inhoud - de Jodenhaat -, maar de dialogen en monologue intérieur zijn zo snerpend dat ze je de adem benemen.Self-driving cars have recently become the norm in England. Their government has pledged that soon all of England’s roads will be a completely autonomous network and that all manual vehicles will be banned within the next ten years. Welp. I think I've reached the end of the road (har har) with John Marrs. I loved The One and The Good Samaritan, but Keeping It In The Family, The Marriage Act, and now this one have all been subpar or worse. The book's singular achievement is its unrelenting tension, mixed with an omnipresence of dread and paranoia. We're pretty much in Otto's head throughout, in real time; the sense of urgency is more than palpable. In the right hands, this is material that could make a heart-stopping film. An afterword reveals that - to some degree - Boschwitz drew from information about his own family. That may explain his particular sensitivity to the protagonist, Otto Silbermann - a businessman perhaps in his late 50s or early 60s. It's certainly unique that such a vivid, convincing, warts-and-all description of the mental terrain of an older gentleman could come from the imagination of a man of 23 (the author's age when the book was first published).

The Passengers - Penguin Books UK

We are privy to Otto’s conversations with other travelers, some of which are quite disconcerting, others not so much, and his musings as he scrambles frantically from train to train wondering: Thank you to Maria at Henry Holt who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.Otto’s struggles to survive after his escape push toward and into the nightmarish, at times frighteningly realistic, at times even more frighteningly Kafkaesque. While he has some money and a few friends (but not all of them want to hear from him), he’s essentially alone, not being able to trust anyone (except his non-Jewish wife who is in a distant city and powerless to help) and coming under suspicion everywhere he goes. To the Nazis and their sympathizers, as Otto comes to see, he has become “a swear word on two legs.” At one point, he observes that while he is still free (that is, not under arrest), he is in fact a prisoner, since “for a Jew the entire Reich is one big concentration camp.” He struggles to understand and accept what has happened to him (and other Jews) and to Germany. “Who could have imagined anything like it?” he thinks. “In the middle of Europe, in the twentieth century?” Libby Dixon is NOT a passenger. Libby hates driverless cars. She knows the damage they are capable of. She walks wherever she can. If she does have to take a taxi, she makes sure it’s one with a driver. She won’t take the bus anymore since they replaced the drivers with computers. Today is Libby's second day of a very different kind of jury duty. Libby was not happy to be selected and hates that she has to take part. Suddenly, the meeting is interrupted. They are told to turn on the news. They see that passengers traveling from different parts of the country have all been told that they may be dead by morning.

THE PASSENGERS | Kirkus Reviews

I will keep this brief and spoiler free, as this story is best if you experience all of the plot twists first hand! The Passenger sets off to discover a land full of charm and conflict, a country that in just a few decades has gone from being a poor, semi-theocratic society to a thriving economy free from the influence of the Catholic Church. The plot twist in the end, my god. This is the first book that i have read by Mr. Marrs and I’m definitely going to give his other books a try. Compelling though the real-life tale is, it’s surpassed by the story between the covers. The central character is Otto Silbermann, a successful, slightly self-satisfied businessman in Berlin who finds his world collapsing in the hours that follow the night of broken glass. He is Jewish, but until now that had been an incidental fact. There’s nothing visibly Jewish about him, he tells us often; his wife is not a Jew. Rather, this is a label the new rulers of the country are insistently imposing on him and which he cannot escape: it is the J stamped in his passport.Er wordt niets verbloemd, ook de kleine kantjes van Otto niet, hoe hij zich gedraagt tegenover geloofsgenoten bijvoorbeeld.