Bright and Dangerous Objects

Solvig makes her living as a commercial deep-sea diver, and she is keeping a private ambition from everyone close to her: she wants to be among the first people to settle on Mars. She is one of roughly a hundred candidates shortlisted for the Mars Project, and joining would mean giving up the only life she has known, permanently.

As the possibility of leaving Earth grows more concrete, Solvig, now thirty-seven, must work out who she really is. She has to decide whether to tell James, her partner, what she is considering, or to abandon the project and build a future on the ground. James hopes they will have a child, and Solvig wonders whether a family and a journey to Mars can coexist, or whether she even wants both.

The novel moves between the ocean and the sky, the mind and the body, and the present and what may come. It considers the tension between personal drive and the responsibilities we accept, along with the long-standing constraints placed on women's choices, set against humanity's early thinking about life beyond our planet.