Freeways: a Journey West On Rout

A young Welsh writer's personal odyssey on Steinbeck's celebrated dust bowl route and winner of the John Morgan Award. It's like a set from a bad movie. The sheets are strewn across the floor, the television is playing to an empty theatre, and there is a hanging smell of cheap cigarettes. I look for blood stains and a body."" And so begins Lewis Davies's trek across America from his David Lynch-like room in a small motel in Tulsa. One summer, using Rt. 66 and the trail taken by the Okies during the 1930s as his map, he makes his way west. His winding road narrative captures the faces, voices, and lives of people who live and work in the restaurants, gas stations, stores, and theme parks along this once-vibrant, now tired, almost desolate route.