Sardonically funny and moving, Skating to Antarctica is a book about a journey into darkness and light, the colour white, fantasy and memory, families and sanity

"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."--Publisher description.

By the author of Nothing Natural, Rainforest and Like Mother, this novel fuses life in the 14th and late 20th centuries. The characters make several journeys into the wilderness between sanity and madness, biology and nurturing, faith and rational discourse.

The reissue of a remarkable novel by this bestselling author ..'A complex dream of a book . . . Jenny Diski is a remarkable writer.' Mail on Sunday ..When Mimi discovered an unconscious bag lady huddled behind a London cinema a sense of duty prompted her to call an ambulance. It was only later that she wondered if the tramp, who could have been anybody, might not have been somebody after all. Could she be Leah, Mimi's abandoned and abandoning mother? Or perhaps she was Bella, a surgically reconstructed bomb-blast victim? Then again, she could have been the perverse and reclusive nun, gifted with terrible, miraculous powers.

Continuing her narration of the story of the Patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, After These Things recounts the relationship between Abraham’s tragic son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob. In following the psychological trail of the children of Abraham, the first properly constituted family, we discover all the complexities of love, power, and desire that make them so quintessentially human. Jenny Diski is the author of eight novels and two memoirs: Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train.