"Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and
excitement I haven't felt for years. It's a modern classic."--Pico
Iyer
A brilliant, fierce writer, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize,
makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her
journey by bicycle along the Silk Road--an illuminating and
thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and
Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and
the natural world.
As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved--to be an
explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician--had gone extinct.
From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes
of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing
left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become
a scientist and go to Mars.
In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down
the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon
mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an
explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live
between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned
for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she
traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within.
Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award
and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris's odyssey and an
exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set
ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the
restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the
existential need to explore--the essential longing to discover what in
the universe we are doing here.
Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account
at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost
Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that
can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and philosophy with the
history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates
our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each
other--a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide
us.
