Joanna Pocock for Greyhound

'Pocock's writing is intellectually and emotionally thrilling. In Greyhound she brings us on a road trip through America's alienated hinterlands - anonymous motels, all-night diners, blighted backstreets - as she builds a kind of philosophy of transience. I'd follow her anywhere.' ~ Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian author and winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her previous book Surrender. In 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation's Environmental Writing Fellowship.

She joins us for her second book, Greyhound.

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles.

Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers - Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz - who chronicled their own road trips across the US.

In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with 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.

'Greyhound is a cool, generous book, an eyewitness account of the end of an empire. I liked crossing the USA in Pocock's company - she is open in her encounters and thinks carefully about it all: appification, motel breakfasts, dawn over the mountains, the people who queue at the bus stop. The journey felt seamless and absorbing, like a long take.' ~ Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency