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.

• Globe and Mail bestseller in Canada
• September 2018 Indie Next Pick selection in the USA
• Winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
• Winner of the 2019 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Literary Nonfiction
• Winner of the 2019 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction
• Winner of the 2019 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature
• Winner of a 2019 OpenBook Award in Taiwan
• Winner of the 2018 Banff Mountain Book Award for Adventure Travel
• 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).

BACK COVER

“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 beginning to end.

Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. 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.”

RELATED Photos & VIDEOS

Silver medals at elementary school science fairs are excellent predictors of a glorious future in adventure. The more serious the photo, the wilder the wandering to come. Melissa “Mel” Yule and Kate in 1993.

Looking giddy and pale with sunscreen in Leh, India, here we are (Kate and Mel) after getting off our bikes for the very last time on the Silk Road, 2011.

Check out more photos from the Silk Road.

Here’s a video we threw together with iMovie featuring 10 months, 10 countries, & 10,000 km of our 2011 Silk Road bike ride...in roughly 10 minutes.

Here’s another Kate & Mel iMovie documentary special, this time about our first bike ride on the Silk Road in 2006. Alas, we never got around to making episodes 2 or 3.