The Girl On The €45 , 000 A DAY Gravy Train

From scraping a living to becoming the eighth highest-paid author in the world, Paula Hawkins is...

PAULA HAWKINS is a millionaire several times over — and, as she wakes every morning in her €3.4 million penthouse, she must sometimes thank her lucky stars.

There is a designer ‘poured resin floor’ (the absolute latest thing), a top-of-the-range Bulthaup kitchen and a roof terrace.

Visitors whoosh up by lift and are presented with spectacular views across the rooftops of London’s financial centre.

The heating, cooling, curtains and TV are all remote-controlled and at 2,500 sq ft, it is larger than many houses.

Just a few years ago, though, home was a slightly shabby Victorian two-up, two-down in Brixton, South London, shared with an ex-boyfriend who provided her with a useful second income as a lodger while she scraped a living as a not-very-successful writer of chick lit.

She had to ask her father for a loan to tide her over because she was broke as she tried a last roll of the dice — to finish her novel.

But the dice did their job and the stunning success of her book, The Girl On The Train, means those days of fretful penury are over.

Recently filed accounts suggest Hawkins has almost €25million in net assets and that she made €16.6 million from book and film royalties last year — that’s €45,000 a day. Forbes magazine says she is the eighth highest-paid author in the world.

It’s all thanks to the phenomenal success of her bestseller, about a hard-drinking, troubled divorcee who becomes entangled in a missing person investigation that sends shockwaves through her life after she spots something on her morning commute.

So, how did Paula Hawkins become The Girl On The Gravy Train?

Her father was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University who became a professor of economics at the University of Zimbabwe. Paula was born in Zimbabwe in 1972, growing into a shy and diligent child.

The family moved to the UK in 1989, when Paula was 17, and she gained a place at Keble College, Oxford, to read PPE (politics, philosophy and economics).

Then she made a move into financial journalism, working on publications including The Times for 15 years. She dreamt for a time of being a foreign correspondent — but now says she would have been ‘terrible’, as she was ‘not intrepid enough’.

SHE wrote her first book, The Money Goddess, which aimed to give women helpful information about their pensions, in 2007. Around a year later, after the financial crash, she had the idea of writing romantic comedies, under the pseudonym Amy Silver.

She said: ‘[My publisher] gave me a basic plan and asked if I could write it. It wasn’t my idea. I did it, and it was fine. It never really felt like me, though — romantic comedy was not my genre at all. As I went through writing these books, they kept getting darker and darker.’

The first, Confessions Of A Reluctant Recessionista, was enough of a success for her to give up her day job.

However, her last attempt at chick lit was a flop, selling fewer than a thousand copies. She said: ‘It just died. It was very stressful, so I was in a bit of a panic.’

Instead, she turned to writing a story inspired by her own former commute to work and the experience of looking into people’s back gardens and kitchens every day from her seat on the train. And she was intrigued by the idea of a character whom, at first, she simply called ‘drunk girl’.

She said: ‘I’d been thinking about someone who had memory problems as a result of drink — that way that if you can’t remember your actions, it changes your relationship to those actions and your sense of guilt and responsibility, and it makes you vulnerable and easily manipulated.

‘Once I’d put this Rachel character on the train, I could see all the possibilities — that this is about perception, about the reliability of a witness.’

In the book, Rachel, a commuter on the 8.04 from Ashbury, in Oxfordshire, to Euston, develops a fixation with a couple she regularly sees from the train, whom she names Jess and Jason. Then Jess vanishes.

It was an idea Hawkins wrote up at speed. She says she ‘polished off’ the first half of the book because she was ‘in dire need of money’, adding: ‘I just needed a book deal, I needed to get some income. I was broke.’

She felt awful asking her dad for a loan. ‘You really don’t need your children borrowing from you at that point in life. I was not in a good place, but it was a real spur to get the book right. I had to nail it and do it really well.

‘For the six months I was writing, I didn’t really do anything else.

‘I didn’t have a partner, so I paid the mortgage by myself and I was thinking: “Oh God, I’m going to have to sell the house or find a new career.” It was the last roll of the dice for me as a fiction writer.’

The book was auctioned, with publishers competing to sign it. A deal with Transworld was signed for an amount said to be ‘well into six figures’. The book went straight to the top of both the UK and US charts.

It was Amazon’s bestselling book of 2015. The New York Times loved it. The US horror writer Stephen King adored it, saying it was a ‘really great suspense novel. Kept me up most of the night.’

The rights were quickly optioned by the American movie studio Dream Works and turned into a film starring Emily Blunt, which drew mixed reviews.

Hawkins — unlike fellow writing phenomenon E. L. James, of Fifty Shades Of Grey fame — had nothing much to do with the making of the movie. But, thanks to the extraordinary success of the book, her life has changed utterly. She has criss-crossed the globe on book tours, including a long one of America and an extensive tour of Australia and New Zealand, when she paid for her parents to fly out and join her in the Antipodes.

There was also an expensive holiday skiing in Courchevel, France, apparently taken with her new lawyer boyfriend.

A widower with two daughters, he specialises in personal injury work and his hobbies include record-collecting and riding Ducati motorbikes.

For her part, Hawkins has said she decided long ago not to have children of her own.

Indeed, it is a subject about which she feels passionately.

She has said: ‘I chose not to have children and you’re seen as this slightly strange, bitter, evil hag or whatever.

‘You are certainly judged if you have chosen not to have children. “Why haven’t you had kids? Don’t you like them? What’s wrong with you?” ’

She added: ‘I actually think I do fine on my own, but you can feel the pity radiating off other people. “Oh, poor you.”

‘You can go: “I’m actually fine with it,” but they don’t believe you and that’s kind of annoying.

‘Obviously, it’s nice to be in a happy relationship. I am now.’

Meanwhile, the immediate problem was how to follow The Girl On The Train.

Last year, she released Into The Water, a gothic noir novel about two sisters in Northumberland.

She had fretted about what she called ‘pressures’ and ‘expectations’ before it came out and, inevitably, it was found wanting compared with The Girl On The Train. It is, though, being made into a film.

THE money has, of course, changed her life. She finds she has to travel a lot, which she hasn’t enjoyed, and she disliked being groomed for the film premiere red carpet.

‘Like a lot of writers, I’m not that extroverted,’ she said. ‘I don’t necessarily feel at home talking to big crowds of people.

‘One can’t complain, but it does make you feel rather exposed, and it’s not a natural state for me to be in.

‘I haven’t managed it that well over the past couple of years, but I have taken some time off recently. I’ve been trying to hide from the world before the whole publicity thing got going.

‘If I can, I’ll get away. I’ll travel. I’ll go somewhere where I can walk. That’s what I like to do — to just get completely away. Be somewhere out of cities, in beautiful countryside, where I can go for hikes and think.’