Published in 2025
400 pages
Joanna Pocock is an Irish Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and she is a contributor to 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 Award. She was short-listed for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award in 2023 for Greyhound
What is this book about?
Combining history, reportage, and nature writing with intimate moments of reflection, Greyhound tells of the journey from miscarriage to parenthood, and the purpose creativity gives to our lives when we feel purposeless
In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound bus across the United States from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the cities, edgelands, highways, and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers—Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz—who also chronicled their road trips across the United States. 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.
