One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed a hundred pounds of apricots - the fruit came from a tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories, spun like those of Scheherazade who used her gifts as a storyteller to prolong her life and weave her way into the heart of a king. So too came adventure; in a library of water in Iceland, in the basin of the Grand Canyon, and in the emptiness of the Arctic. As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit draws together the threads of her life with the lives of others.