Spying on America
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Goose Lane Editions
Published:7th Apr '26
£20.00
Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.
On a June morning in 2022, Bill Gaston drives off the Victoria–Port Angeles ferry in a rented Dodge Charger with his two sons. Born in the USA but “Canadian through and through,” Gaston is on a road trip to Tabor, Iowa, the town founded by his great, great, great-grandparents as the westernmost hub of the Underground Railroad.
The Gastons’ eleven-day trip to Tabor and back takes them up and down and across a swathe of rural red states. Motivated equally by a curiosity to find out what really makes Americans tick and the motto ya gotta stop, the Gastons explore the American west, navigate unmapped dirt roads, eat too many French fries, overnight in clapped-out motels, visit a Buddhist mountain monastery, marvel at spectacular landforms, and enjoy unlikely conversations with real Americans.
Both a sideways glance at contemporary American culture and a mordant yet tender account of the true meaning of ancestry, Spying on America is an unpredictably insightful exploration of family, Canada’s neighbour, and the “American bald ego.”
“Spying on America is a fascinating road trip in a muscle car, a family quest to visit a tiny Iowa town founded by Bill Gaston’s ancestors as a western hub of the Underground Railway. The father and son story zigzags through Buddhism and Trumpism, bad karoake and very good Mexican food, finding kindred souls and Red State epiphanies fuelled by Dog Slobber ale.” -- Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man
“The beating heart of Spying on America is Gaston’s love and respect for his family, his reckoning with his own changing realities, and his sheer, unfettered joy at the oddness of the world and the people it contains. It’s a warm, beautiful book.” -- Robert J. Wiersema * Quill & Quire *
ISBN: 9781773104652
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 16mm
Weight: 395g
248 pages