Bright and Dangerous Objects

Thirty-seven-year-old Solvig has a secret. She wants to be one of the first human beings to colonize Mars and she's one of a hundred people shortlisted by the Mars One Project to do just that. But to fulfill her ambition, she'll have to leave everything she's ever known for the rest of her life. She'll have to leave her job as a deep sea diver, sacrificing the strange liberty she feels thousands of feet under water in a saturation chamber. She'll have to leave her father, old and in need of care. And she'll have to leave James, her partner, who wants to have a baby.

As the prospect of heading to Mars becomes more and more real, Solvig is forced to define who she really is. Will she come clean to James, or continue her application covertly? Or will she turn her back on the project, and commit to the life she's built for herself? And when she discovers she's pregnant, she finds a sharp new clarity, but has it come too late? Is there any way she can start a family and go to Mars? Does she even want both things?

Relatable and transporting, Bright and Dangerous Objects explores the space between ambition and obligation, grappling with questions women have faced for centuries while investigating a future that humanity is only beginning to think about. In frank, funny, and moving prose, author Anneliese Mackintosh moves from sea to sky, head to heart, and present to future, asking all the while what it means when our wildest dreams begin to come true.