'Greyhound' - Joanna Pocock

“a road trip like no other, a personal memoir interwoven with history, anthropology and landscape”

Lee Langley

A new book by Joanna Pocock is my current reading. It's a great read...

This Observer review was what made me interested in the book, which describes two journeys across the USA on Greyhound buses - one in 2006 and one in 2023 - and much has changed in between.

A preview can be read on Google Books.

Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual against the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.

From Fitzcarraldo Editions page

My copy was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, who have an excellent range of writers working for them, and more of their books have appeared on my shelves in the last year or so than from most other publishers.

Here's a Spectator Podcast with the author.