Greyhound
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing:14th Aug '25
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 14th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
‘Pocock’s prose is understated and spare, and, like a cave painting, does perfect justice to her subject.... This is nature writing that we need: standing in contrast to writing that forces the human into the picture as observer, or tries hard to pin the thing down exactly, with alienating expertise or florid description.... [Pocock’s] is a perspective not of objectivity or voyeurism, but of participation in the web of life and in the land and communities as she writes them.’
— Abi Andrews, Irish Times (praise for Surrender)
‘This is a bewitching and deeply affecting book. Pocock’s elegant interweaving of the intimate and the expansive, the personal and the universal, culminates in a work that forces us to consider our own place in, and impact upon, a world that could itself have more past than future.’
— Tom Smalley, Spectator (praise for Surrender)
‘Pocock is an environmentalist, yet she is also clearly a humanist. She is always willing to hear people out, no matter how extreme their points of view, and to accept the limits of her own knowledge.... [W]hether it is climate crisis or midlife crisis, Pocock holds her themes lightly, allowing the “fluidity of life” to run its course.’
— Clare Saxby, Times Literary Supplement (praise for Surrender)
‘Surrender is an astonishing book about the fragility of nature, grief, the American West, the consolations of travel and the exquisite agonies of mortal life. Pocock travels widely in time and space, through memories, visions, the deaths of her parents and the birth of her child. Beautiful, wise and deeply moving, this is ambulatory philosophy at its finest – for readers of Rebecca Solnit, Lauren Elkin, Garnette Cadogan and Iain Sinclair.’
— Joanna Kavenna, author of A Field Guide to Reality (praise for Surrender)
‘Written with great narrative richness and an anthropologist’s intrepid gaze, Surrender is fascinating, urgent and profoundly compelling. It is an important addition to nature’s library.’
— Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters (praise for Surrender)
ISBN: 9781804271384
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
296 pages