Stranger On A Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America

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.

Jenny Diski was born in 1947 in London where she has lived most of her life. She recently moved to Cambridge. She is the author of eight novels and an acclaimed memoir and her journalism has appeared in the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, amongst others.