More a memoir than a travelogue, Stranger on a Train is Jenny Diski’s account of daydreaming & 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 & 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 & the nature of friendship & memories triggered by her past times in psychiatric hospitals. Diski is honest if not brutal about her self & 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 & the people we meet. Cutting between her troubled teenaged years & contemporary America, the journey becomes a study of strangers, strangeness & estrangement
- from oneself, as well as from the world.* Winner of The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award & The J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography*