The best of Helen Kane exists in space.
If she doesn't go back up, she'll be consigned to a lesser version of herself on a planet that has also seen better days. Helen is an experienced astronaut with a NASA position and a struggling grown-up daughter who needs her but when, at fifty-three, she is offered a place on the training programme for the first mission to Mars, the most realistic simulation ever, she cannot refuse a last chance to walk among the stars. Her fellow astronauts are Sergei, a gruff Russian whose teenage sons are less mysterious to him than they'd like to think; and Yoshi, who wants to prove himself worthy of the wife he has drifted apart from.
