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.
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'These experiences provide fascinating material for a writer as non-judgmental as Pocock, who sees the Greyhound network as a place of "fragility", a rare public space where "anarchic, communal, bus-wide conversations" offer a window on to an America you'd never see if you only travelled by car... [She] resists the temptation towards a conventional narrative arc, not least because this already intriguing story is complemented by an account of a 2023 trip following the same route, allowing Pocock to see how the places she travelled through 17 years prior had changed. Greyhound is a skilful intertwining of these two journeys: part travelogue, part environmental treatise, and utterly distinct.... This ambitious book asks important societal questions and is astute in its depictions of public living.... Traversing urban metropolises and desert vistas, Greyhound is an erudite study of how living among others became a dying art.'
- Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Observer 'In Greyhound, Pocock takes us on an epic road trip through American landscapes, through urban dreams and nightmares. Along the way, she asks: how can our material comfort coexist with the impoverishment of nature? How much degradation do we have to witness before we change our way of living? With an exquisite and beautifully reflective prose, Pocock explores a heart of darkness, and expresses a deep desire and need to connect with the earth. It is a wonderful and vivid text from one of our most important ecofeminist writers.'
- Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle 'Joanna Pocock's Greyhound manages to be two things at once: a perfect American road trip story in the model of John Steinbeck and Simone de Beauvoir, and a brilliant critique of that most seductive and insidious of genres. In her hands, the American road is rendered in all its gorgeous complexity, a place of violence and inequality, as well as a route to liberation.'
- Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest '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 '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 'Joanna Pocock's Greyhound is an intimate epic, and a fierce mirror held to our U.S. ecological and sociological present such as only a visitor, seemingly, can provide. The thinking is scrupulous, the writing scraped and glinting and as stark as the landscape. This book kept me up all night and will stay with me.'
- Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel 'Pocock reveals a complicated American landscape from the shabby seats of Greyhound buses and through a pinhole of grief as she retraces her past and a country's past and finds suffering and redemption in both. She is at the mercy of the communities and the country she encounters, which, like the nation itself, is also gripped in its own reckoning. Like Denis Johnson's Angels and Jonathan Raban's Bad Land, Greyhound finds truth and decency in the unglamorous and shows how the United States has perhaps always been on unstable soil.'
- Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town 'Joanna Pocock's haunting, haunted journey across America's edgelands tells a troubled story of the country's journey to a more insular version of itself. Yet the dream of travel still holds, and the way we move can still move us. Her eye for the beauty of the gas station and the entrancing ennui of motel-land call to mind the photographs of Robert Adams and Blood in the Tracks-era Dylan. Most of all, she captures the camaraderie and transcendence of bus travel, where "strangers are connected by the simple need to get somewhere". Greyhound is as expansive as the landscape it travels through.'
- David Farrier, author of Nature's Genius 'Erudite, empathic and intensely engaging, Joanna Pocock rides the bus through our broken America with the eyes of a time traveller, on highways that are also paths through memory, skillfully intertwining narratives of her own journeys through different stages of life and others who have traced similar routes. Greyhound bears witness to how the damage we feel in our own lives and communities is rooted in our damaged relationship with the land on which we live, and in doing so provides a powerful prism through which to think about where we have been, where we are going, and other roads we could take.'
- Christopher Brown, author of A Natural History of Empty Lots 'Joanna Pocock's Greyhound is a bold and urgent reckoning with the unsung realities of the United States. Travelling cross-country by bus, she encounters economic castaways, environmental catastrophes, shrinking public spaces, and cities as believable but unreal as sheets of shimmering water in a desert, asking what happens when we live for too long with the power of myths. And she shows - in prose of beautiful clarity and through stories of poignant revelation shared by fellow travellers on lone journeys of their own - how community can be reimagined when on the move. This is a road trip across America like no other.'
- Julian Hoffman, author of Lifelines 'Greyhound is an instant classic, a chronicle of desperation, anger and violence, as well as the luminous beauty and humanity that four decades of neoliberal looting have been unable to kill off from the American countryside. Pocock's eye is sharp and her prose crackles with wistfulness, fleeting camaraderie and vitality. Not since William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways has a book so captured the feeling of the road.'
- Daegan Miller, This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent
Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and Guardian US, and she is a contributing editor at the Dark Mountain project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation's Environmental Writing Fellowship. Greyhound is her second book.
