About

The author

Rae Ellison writes at the far end of the day, after the working one is finished.

She is in her fifties. She has grown children, a full-time job in the corporate world, and the particular clear-headedness of a woman who has spent thirty years being the person in the room who actually reads the document. None of that is what she is for. It pays for the house and it does not touch the part of her that has been quietly planning expeditions since she was nine.

She has always been a fantasist, and she means that as a compliment. She is the reader who finds a single paragraph about a horse buried in permafrost with its tattoos still legible and loses a fortnight to it — maps, weather windows, border crossings, what it would actually cost to get a generator to two and a half thousand metres. She has never gone. She has worked out, in some detail, how she would.