ID this gmmicky book about a London Underground train

[samadriel]

I picked up this book at the library many years ago, I think it's name was a number; if not, the book at least revolved around this number, the number being the total number of people on a fully-populated London Underground train, including the driver. Each page of the book was about one passenger on the train, starting with the driver, who has just fallen asleep; the book spans about five minutes between the driver falling asleep, and the train crashing and killing everyone on board. The book was a print version of a website the author had originally set up to exhibit this writing exercise. The ending (which might have been a single page like the other sections of the book) was a strange hippy-dippy affair about a mysterious homeless woman in the vicinity of the crashed train.

I would love to give this book another read, although I can't remember if it was that great; it was just a really good gimmick, and the fated death of all the men, women and children on the train gave it a frisson of gloominess. Who among you can name this book?!

[samadriel]

Oh, hey, I finally found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/253_%28novel%29 . Murder this thread!

[Mr Banlon]

Sounds like a more complicated version of this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_of_Events

[Astronaut Omens]

253 got under my skin too, for its addictive readability and because it required a re-read once you knew the ending, to really get what was happening.

[Icehaven]

The premise reminds me a bit of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, about a group of people who die when a bridge collapses and their backstories, how they came to be on the bridge etc. I'm sure there's other books with the same basic idea though, it's a fairly versatile basis for a plot.

[who cares]

I wrote a book about all the customers who were in Waitrose in Hackney when they ran out of quinoa, and how their lives were affected from that point on, but the publishers weren't interested

[studpuppet]

We did a couple of gimmicky titles around this time - the other one was Matt Beaumont's 'e' which might seem a ludicrous concept now, but was cutting edge back in 2000.[nb]I remember when I started working in 1998, the company sent round a self-congratulatory email, telling everyone that there was now one computer on every desk in the building.[/nb]

I was reminded of '253' in the aftermath of 7/7 when the the national newspapers basically used the same plot, but with dead people.