Excerpt from The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I want to run. I want to take a road trip, in a convertible, with the top down. I want to drive to the coast—any coast. I want to walk on a beach. Me and my big brother were going to be road trippers. We had such plans, Ben and I. Well, they were Ben's plans mostly—he was such a dreamer. We were going to ride motorbikes from Paris to the Côte d'Azur, or all the way down the Pacific coast of the USA, from Seattle to Los Angeles; we were going to follow in Che Guevara's tracks from Buenos Aires to Caracas. Maybe if I'd done all that, I wouldn't have ended up here, not knowing what to do next. Or maybe, if I'd done all that, I'd have ended up exactly where I am and I would be perfectly contented. But I didn't do all that, of course, because Ben never got as far as Paris, he never even made it as far as Cambridge. He died on the A10, his skull crushed beneath the wheels of an articulated lorry.

I miss him every day. More than anyone, I think. He's the big hole in my life, in the middle of my soul. Or maybe he was just the beginning of it. I don't know. I don't even know whether all this is really about Ben, or whether it's about everything that happened after that, and everything that's happened since. All I know is, one minute I'm ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next I can't wait to get away, I'm all over the place, slipping and sliding again.

So, I'm going to see a therapist! Which could be weird, but it could be a laugh, too. I've always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.

This is not quite the same thing, of course. I'm a bit nervous, but I haven't been able to get to sleep lately, and Scott's been on my case to go. I told him I find it difficult enough talking to people I know about this stuff—I can barely even talk to him about it. He said that's the point, you can say anything to strangers. But that isn't completely true. You can't just say anything. Poor Scott. He doesn't know the half of it. He loves me so much, it makes me ache. I don't know how he does it. I would drive me mad.

But I have to do something, and at least this feels like action. All those plans I had—photography courses and cookery classes—when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I'm playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. I can't do this, I can't just be a wife. I don't understand how anyone does it—there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you.

EVENING

I've been kept waiting. The appointment was for half an hour ago, and I'm still here, sitting in the reception room flicking through Vogue, thinking about getting up and walking out. I know doctors' appointments run over, but therapists? Films have always led me to believe that they kick you out the moment your thirty minutes are up. I suppose Hollywood isn't really talking about the kind of therapist you get referred to on the National Health Service.

I'm just about to go up to the receptionist to tell her that I've waited long enough, I'm leaving, when the doctor's office door swings open and this very tall, lanky man emerges, looking apologetic and holding out his hand to me.

"Mrs. Hipwell, I am so sorry to have kept you waiting," he says, and I just smile at him and tell him it's all right, and I feel, in this moment, that it will be all right, because I've only been in his company for a moment or two and already I feel soothed.

Excerpted from The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. Copyright © 1905 by Paula Hawkins. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.