Traversal

This is a new book. Condition: Brand New.

In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?

Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions - our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems - through the intertwined lives, loves and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright. Woven throughout their stories are other threads - the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue - which come together to create a rich tapestry of life's meaning; exploring what it is that makes life alive and worth living.

By turns epic and intimate, Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.

Book details and technical specifications

Format: Hardback
ISBN13: 9781837265619
Published: March 2026

Number of pages: 608
Width: 159 mm
Height: 240 mm
Depth: 48 mm

Publisher: Canongate Books