Falling to Earth - by Kate Harris (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A stirring memoir about finding home in an off-grid cabin outside of a wildly remote town, and a gorgeous meditation on how to live intentionally--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 near Atlin, a five-hundred-person town in British Columbia near the Alaskan border. 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 Atlin 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 a place that, like the fireball and life itself, refuses to be pinned down. Staying put in Atlin for nearly a decade, Harris finds her most thrilling adventure yet. And in living in a cabin in the woods, she discovers the paradox at the heart of self-reliance: only community makes life possible.

About the Author

KATE HARRIS is the author of Lands of Lost Borders, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Boardman Tasker Prize, and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, among others, and was translated into several languages. Her writing has also appeared in Granta, Outside, The Walrus, and The Georgia Review, with notable mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. A former Rhodes scholar with a background in biology, geology, and the history and philosophy of science, Kate lives off-grid at the end of the road in northernmost British Columbia.