Best Seller
Falling to Earth
Hardcover
$32.00
Available on Jun 22, 2027 | 272 Pages
A stirring memoir about finding home in a remote northern community, and a gorgeous meditation on the nature and meaning of life in the cosmos, by the award-winning author of Lands of Lost Borders.
Too steep by a few degrees, and you burn up from atmospheric friction. Too shallow, and you bounce back into space, never to return. But a close pass at just the right slant and speed can nudge a life out of one orbit into another.
At 8:43 am on January 18, 2000, a fireball from outer space exploded over a frozen lake in the Boundary Ranges edging British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. The conditions that frigid morning were perfect, and the fireball would yield some of the most pristine meteorite samples ever recovered, containing the building blocks of life itself.
Four years later, Kate Harris landed in roughly the same spot. Training to be an astrobiologist, she was intent on travelling to the most alien environments she could find. She hoped to explore the potential for biology on other worlds and ultimately follow a meteorite’s flight path in reverse, leaving Earth behind. Instead, a chance encounter with a tiny subarctic town in the Boundary Ranges set her on a different trajectory, one less focused on defining what life is so much as with asking: how should we live?
Blending memoir, philosophy, science, history, and exquisite nature writing, Falling to Earth is a story of wanderlust gone local in place that, like the fireball and life itself, refuses to be pinned down. Staying put for nearly a decade, Harris finds her most thrilling adventure yet. And in living off-grid in a cabin in the woods, she discovers the paradox at the heart of self-reliance: only community makes life possible.
Too steep by a few degrees, and you burn up from atmospheric friction. Too shallow, and you bounce back into space, never to return. But a close pass at just the right slant and speed can nudge a life out of one orbit into another.
At 8:43 am on January 18, 2000, a fireball from outer space exploded over a frozen lake in the Boundary Ranges edging British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. The conditions that frigid morning were perfect, and the fireball would yield some of the most pristine meteorite samples ever recovered, containing the building blocks of life itself.
Four years later, Kate Harris landed in roughly the same spot. Training to be an astrobiologist, she was intent on travelling to the most alien environments she could find. She hoped to explore the potential for biology on other worlds and ultimately follow a meteorite’s flight path in reverse, leaving Earth behind. Instead, a chance encounter with a tiny subarctic town in the Boundary Ranges set her on a different trajectory, one less focused on defining what life is so much as with asking: how should we live?
Blending memoir, philosophy, science, history, and exquisite nature writing, Falling to Earth is a story of wanderlust gone local in place that, like the fireball and life itself, refuses to be pinned down. Staying put for nearly a decade, Harris finds her most thrilling adventure yet. And in living off-grid in a cabin in the woods, she discovers the paradox at the heart of self-reliance: only community makes life possible.
Author
Kate Harris
KATE HARRIS is a writer and adventurer with a knack for getting lost. Named one of Canada’s top modern-day explorers, her award-winning nature and travel writing has featured in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic Travel, Sidetracked and The Georgia Review, and cited in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. Her debut memoir, Lands of Lost Borders, about biking the Silk Road, was a #1 National Bestseller, the winner of the RBC Taylor Prize, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, the Banff Mountain Book Competition’s Adventure Travel Award, and was a finalist for the BC Book Prize’s Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. She has degrees in science from MIT and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the history of science from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes scholar. When she isn’t away on expeditions, or reporting on UN environmental negotiations for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Harris lives off-grid in a log cabin on the border of the Yukon, British Columbia and Alaska. www.kateharris.ca
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