Falling to Earth

**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.