Stranger On A Train
Daydreaming and Smoking Around America
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Little, Brown Book Group
Published:15th Jan '04
£11.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
* Author PR activity to include media interviews and appearances at literature festivals * Review coverage * Submitted for trade promotions * Reading copies available * Advertising campaign in the literary press I.e. Granta, London Review of Books and Waterstone's Books Quarterly
* Follows the prize winning memoir, Skating to Antarctica.
* The story of her troubled teenage years in and out of psychiatric institutions intercut with a contemporary tale of travelling across America by train, surrounded by strangers.
'I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like' EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?)
In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay home with the phone off the hook, Jenny Diski takes a trip around the perimeter of the USA by train. Somewhat reluctantly she meets all kinds of characters, all bursting with stories to tell and finds herself brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape of America, half-known already through film and television. 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. 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.
Her writing is sensitive, sincere and sparkling. * Morning Star *
(Diski's) near-erotic musings on the dreaded weed almost made me want to take up smoking again. And that's saying something. * Irish Times *
Beautifully written * Times *
- Winner of Thomas Cook Travel Awards 2003 (UK)
ISBN: 9781860499951
Dimensions: 131mm x 200mm x 19mm
Weight: 198g
288 pages