As a new wave of interplanetary exploration unfolds, a talented young planetary scientist charts our centuries-old obsession with Mars.

'Beautifully written, emotive - a love letter to a planet' DERMOT O'LEARY, BBC Radio 2

Mars - bewilderingly empty, coated in red dust - is an unlikely place to pin our hopes of finding life elsewhere. And yet, right now multiple spacecraft are circling, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium and Mare Sirenum - on the brink, perhaps, of a discovery that would inspire humankind as much as any in our history.

With poetic precision and grace, Sarah Stewart Johnson traces the evocative history of our explorations of Mars. She interlaces her personal journey as a scientist with tales of other seekers - from Galileo to William Herschel to Carl Sagan - who have scoured this enigmatic planet for signs of life and transformed it in our understanding from a distant point of light into a complex world. Ultimately, she shows how its story is also a story about Earth: it is a foil, a mirror, a tell-tale reflection of our own anxieties and yearnings to find - if we're lucky - that we're not alone.

'Elegantly written and boundlessly entertaining' Sunday Telegraph

'Beguiling' The Times

'Johnson's prose swirls with lyrical wonder, as varied and multi-hued as the apricot deserts, butterscotch skies and blue sunsets of Mars' Anthony Doerr, New York Times Book Review

'Elegantly crafted' Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal

"Beautifully written, emotive - a love letter to a planet" - BBC Radio 2

"Elegantly written and boundlessly entertaining" - Sunday Telegraph

"Beguiling" - The Times

"Johnson's prose swirls with lyrical wonder, as varied and multi-hued as the apricot deserts, butterscotch skies and blue sunsets of Mars" - New York Times Book Review

"Exhilarating, informative, always engaging... beautiful in its descriptions" - Literary Review

"There's no better guide to what NASA's various Mars missions have revealed ... A true love letter to geology, on this world and others" - Nature

"A must-read for fans of our Martian neighbour and humanity's longstanding search for life elsewhere in the Universe" - BBC Sky At Night

"Mars is an exceptionally inhospitable place. The coldest Antarctic winter, the windiest Everest December - each is as nothing compared with an unremarkable day on the red planet. That is precisely why Mars is such a good place to look for life. If it exists there, Sarah Stewart Johnson writes, "the smallest breath in the deepest night", then the only conclusion is there must be life throughout the universe. This beguiling book is about the search for life on Mars - from those who thought the planet was criss-crossed with canals to those, like the author, who just hope for a microbe or two." - Times (best books of the year)

"Brilliantly realised... Full of joy and existential curiosity, the book's images and metaphors take up residence in our minds and burn there, connecting scientific inquiry with deep questions about human existence. In every line Johnson makes us feel the passion for discovery and the desire to connect" - The Whiting Award Selection Committee