Jessica Bruder is an American journalist and reporter, a long-time contributor to The New York Times and Harper’s Magazine, known for her in-depth reportages on social phenomena hidden behind America’s official image. She stumbled upon the Nomadland story by chance — a woman living in a van in a shopping-mall car park became the starting point for three years of research, during which Bruder herself repeatedly got into a vehicle and set out alongside her subjects.

Nomadland describes a new social phenomenon that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis: tens of thousands of Americans in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who lost their homes, savings, and the prospect of retirement, and instead of the expected quiet found themselves in cars and campervans travelling the country in search of seasonal work. They work in Amazon warehouses, harvest sugar beets in fields, work at national parks and campgrounds. The cost they pay is their health and freedom.

The central figure is Linda May — a woman in her seventies, a former cashier who dreams of building her own tiny earth-shelter home on a patch of desert. Around her Bruder builds a gallery of portraits of people who have found in the nomadic community something they could not have in their former lives: solidarity, freedom from a mortgage, a sense of belonging. The author does not romanticise this reality — she shows exhaustion, backache, empty fuel tanks, and the fear of illness without health insurance.

The reportage is a diagnosis of a society in which the social safety net has ceased to function, and corporations are happy to exploit the flexible, rightless labour of people who have nothing left. The book became the basis for Chloé Zhao’s Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning film Nomadland (2020).