Stranger on a Train

£7.99

More a memoir than a travelogue, Stranger on a Train is Jenny Diski’s account of daydreaming and smoking around America with interruptions - a magical train tour around the perimeter of the USA.

In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay home with the phone off the hook, Diski finds herself in a smoking carriage brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape of America, half-known already through film and television. Somewhat reluctantly she meets all kinds of characters, all bursting with stories to tell. Like the pulse of the train over the rails, the theme of the dying pleasures of smoking thrums through the book, along with reflections on the condition of solitude and the nature of friendship and memories triggered by her past times in psychiatric hospitals.

Diski is honest if not brutal about her self and her fellow travellers in this very personal journey. Unlike many books published in the travel genre, in Stranger on a Train there is some actual discussion about why we travel, the solitude of a voyage and the people we meet. Cutting between her troubled teenaged years and contemporary America, the journey becomes a study of strangers, strangeness and estrangement - from oneself, as well as from the world.

Winner of The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and The J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography

“Rattles furiously along its tracks, creating frequent sparks and taking unforeseen turns”, Financial Times

“A formidable travel writer”, Irish Times