Could Gone Girl on the Train be the next bestseller?

From Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train to The Expats and The Expatriates, there is no shortage of recycling when it comes to new titles

Are authors running out of titles? January and February’s offerings suggest they’re finding it increasingly difficult to devise new ones. Instead they settle for names that recycle, reference or rework those of other books or artworks.

Sometimes the aim is evidently to associate the new work with the old one in the buyer’s mind, as when Helen Ellis’s American Housewife brazenly recalls Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife (just as Paula Hawkins’s mega-selling, girl-less The Girl on the Train nodded to Gone Girl). Or they suggest it belongs to traditions beloved of the author, like Christopher Brookmyre’s Black Widow, previously used for several films noirs and characters in comics; or that it might be a just-discovered posthumous offering, as with Robert Ryan’s Dr Watson mystery The Sign of Fear (modelled on Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four).

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