Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from beginning to end. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle.

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.

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. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. “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.

Published in Canada by Knopf Canada and the US/UK/Australia/NZ by HarperCollins, with translated editions in Germany ( Auf der Seidenstraße/Piper), France ( Sur les Terres des Frontières Perdues/Editions Artaud), China (ThinKingdom Media), and Taiwan ( 無界之疆, New Century Publishing Co., Ltd).

Winner of the 2018 Banff Mountain Book Award for Adventure Travel.

Winner of a 2019 OpenBook Award in Taiwan.

Winner of the 2019 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature.

Winner of the 2019 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction.

Winner of the 2019 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Literary Nonfiction.

Winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

September 2018 Indie Next Pick selection in the USA.Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

Land of lost borders kate harris