Parents' Guide to The Midnight Train: The Midnight World, Book 2

THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN begins with a honeymoon in Venice. It's 1974 and Wilbur and Maggie Budd, who've known each other since they were teenagers, have just been married. The story then moves 52 years into the future. Wilbur and Maggie have been divorced for more than 30 years and he's stunned to receive a call from her. Perhaps, asks Wilbur, they could meet? But before that can happen, he dies and finds himself on a deserted train platform in the middle of nowhere. The Midnight Train, an old fashioned three-cylinder passenger steam engine arrives that will take Wilbur back through his life before reaching eternity. Agnes Deborah Amaryllis Bagdale is also on the train; she's the woman who owned the bookshop in Wilbur's hometown of Sheffield. She tells Wilbur she'll be his (now ghostly) guide on the journey. He'll revisit a childhood reading comics with his best friend Charlie Applewood, his turbulent life at home, the arrest of his brother for robbery, meeting and crushing on Maggie, and winning a scholarship to study at Oxford. Then there's a stop at the night that changed everything. Suddenlym, he's no longer Oxford-bound, but staying in Sheffield and working at Bagdale's Bookshop. He eventually buys the shop, marries Maggie in 1971, and expands the business to a chain of stores, becoming so successful he owns six houses in three countries. But his ambition will cost him both his marriage and a life-long friendship his best friend, Charlie. Wilbur must confront why it all went so wrong and just perhaps he may be offered a second chance.