'A glimpse of life in all its complexity … a cracking book.' — Menna Elfyn, Western Mail

In 2016 Grug Muse rode a bicycle alone across the United States: four thousand miles from Cape Cod to Portland, Oregon, in eighty days. Her first book of prose carries the whole apparatus of the journey — hills and weather, safe roads and traffic, where to sleep and where to find water — alongside everything the journey was really for.

She wrote it up while voting in the 2024 presidential election, and the double exposure gives the book its charge: a country met at ground level, one conversation at a time, set against the same country seen whole from a distance. She loses her passport in North Dakota and, searching for it, finds a Welsh-speaking librarian in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Dryly funny and unsentimental, this is not America explained but America overheard.

It is also the imperial centre described in one of Europe's oldest minoritised languages, by a poet who holds an American passport through her father and is neither tourist nor native — a rare angle in travel writing.