Sam Leith's guest for this week's Book Club podcast is Joanna Pocock, whose new book Greyhound describes two trips she took across America by Greyhound bus in 2006 and 2023. They talk about the literature of the road, that distinctively American and usually distinctively male genre, and the meaning of travel – and Joanna tells Sam how the America you see from a Greyhound differs from the one you see on television; and how dramatically it has changed even over the last couple of decades.

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Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Nicola Barker, talking about her new book TonyInterruptor -- about how a man who interrupts a free jazz concert becomes a viral sensation on social media. Nicola tells Sam why some of her books are bouts of the flu and some are sneezes, how hard she works on her apparently spontaneous prose, why she remains devoted to reality television — and about the time she went to visit Martin Amis with a ghetto blaster.

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Sam Leith is joined for this week's Book Club podcast by Gary Shteyngart — whose new novel Vera, or Faith is set in a near-future America whose politics seems to be less science-fictional by the day. It tells the unexpectedly tender story of a bright but lonely ten-year-old girl contending with her parents' failing marriage and navigating the beginnings of a friendship. Gary tells Sam how parenthood changed him as a writer, how his feelings about his Russian heritage have shifted uncomfortably in light both of the Ukraine invasion and the US's fresh hostility to migrants, and why Writers' Tears is his students' drink of choice.

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For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts and to contact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk

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