Greyhound

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.

‘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