Land of Lost Borders Kate Harris

As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved—that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher—had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole Earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars.

To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end.

Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous, about the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the stars and like our selves, can never be fully mapped.

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 2018

336g