The Sirens of Mars

Beautifully written, emotive - a love letter to a planet – Dermot O’Leary * 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 – Anthony Doerr * New York Times Book Review *The inside story of the exploration of Mars. A young woman scientist shows what it is like to be in the thick of exciting and ground-breaking research. – Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Professor of Astrophysics, University of OxfordExhilarating, informative, always engaging… beautiful in its descriptions – Andrew Crumey * Literary Review *This elegantly crafted book conveys what it’s like to be a young scientist involved in the quest. – Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and author of On the Future: Prospects for HumanityA celebration of human curiosity, passion and perseverance. Superb in its storytelling, majestic in its vision, The Sirens of Mars will give readers a new appreciation for the preciousness of life in the cosmos. – Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s DreamsThe Sirens of Mars provides the prospect of great discovery, and an introduction to a writer of the first rank. – Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard UniversityThere’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 *

Sarah Stewart Johnson is an associate professor at Georgetown University, where she teaches astrobiology and planetary science and leads a biosignatures laboratory. A former Goldwater, Truman, and Rhodes Scholar, as well as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, she received degrees in PPE and in Biology from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from MIT. She worked with President Obama’s science advisor in the White House, and now serves on the science team for NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover.