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Pages 1-35

· The following version of this book was used to create this lesson plan: Cusk, Rachel. Second Place. Faber & Faber, 2021.

· The story opens with the narrator speaking to an unknown addressee named Jeffers.

· She tells him that she once “met the devil on a train leaving Paris” (3), which began a years’ long series of negative events.

· The narrative shifts to the day the narrator met the devil on the train.

· He followed her on the crowded train and she thought if she sat somewhere else she would lose him.

· The man is described as “yellow and bloated with bloodshot bile coloured eyes, and...dirty teeth” (4).

· He sat with a young girl on his lap who was “nothing more than a painted child” and “was barely clothed” (4).

· The narrator does not say anything to the man as he pets the little girl, thinking someone else might or should...

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