Hello, I’m Pearl Ellen, and this is the book I wrote because I could never look at a clear night sky without wanting to ask a question.

Where did we come from? Has life begun more than once? If someone, somewhere, got here before us, would we even know? I’ve been turning those questions over for as long as I can remember, and somewhere along the way I noticed that the answers on offer tended to come in two flavours: breathless certainty, or a shrug. I wanted a third thing. Wonder, with its receipts.

So this is a book for people who love the big questions but are tired of being sold the answer. It is not a book about knowing. It’s about how we find out, how to tell a good clue from a good story, and how to stay curious without switching off the part of you that says “hang on, what’s the evidence?”

I’m not writing as an expert with something to sell you, just as a curious reader who likes to check the sources and who changes her mind when the evidence does. Honesty seemed the right place to start a book about evidence.

If you finish it with more questions than you started with, and a slightly better toolkit for asking them, then it’s done its job. You can find me at pearlellen.co.uk.

Read the free sample