The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir

　　在丈夫因癌症病逝之後，失去摯愛的天體物理學家莎拉．西格(Sara Seager)，她的世界首次變得空白黯淡。突然之間，她成為了一位40歲的單親媽媽。過去，她的亞斯伯格症就像是生活中的背景噪音一樣，但丈夫逝世之後，她卻無時無刻不感到痛苦，也從未在這宇宙中覺得如此孤獨。

　　在專業領域的成就斐然，曾榮獲海倫．B．華納天文學獎、麥克阿瑟獎等獎項肯定的西格，在這本回憶錄中坦率寫下真實的自我，一字一句述說著她如何在艱難橫渡悲傷的同時，廣闊療癒的宇宙為她打開了探索的大門。她不僅在熱愛的天體物理學中，不斷深入鑽研、發現讓她無比感動的美，身邊更有一群人，不吝伸出援手，讓她的悲傷得到慰藉。

　　西格的個人經歷，與她傑出的科學成就，一樣令人難忘，在這部優美的回憶錄中，西格將她熱愛的行星、宇宙，投射到她這一路走來，經歷愛、失去與希望的旅程。「我們渴望能成為他人生命裡的光。」宇宙的深空與神秘，恰恰適用於人與人之間的連結之中，而世界上最小的光源，也就是自身在黑暗中發出的光輝。(文/博客來編譯)

　　In The Smallest Lights in the Universe, MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager interweaves the story of her search for meaning and solace after losing her first husband to cancer, her unflagging search for an Earth-like exoplanet and her unexpected discovery of new love.

　　Sara Seager has made it her life's work to peer into the spaces around stars – looking for exoplanets outside our solar system, hoping to find the one-in-a-billion world enough like ours to sustain life. But with the unexpected death of her husband, her life became an empty, lightless space. Suddenly, she was the single mother of two young boys, a widow at forty, clinging to three crumpled pages of instructions her husband had written for things like grocery shopping – things he had done while she did pioneering work as a planetary scientist at MIT. She became painfully conscious of her Asperger's, which before losing her husband had felt more like background noise. She felt, for the first time, alone in the universe.

　　In this probing, invigoratingly honest memoir, Seager tells the story of how, as she stumblingly navigated the world of grief, she also kept looking for other worlds. She continues to develop ground-breaking projects, such as the Starshade, a sunflower-shaped instrument that, when launched into space, unfurls itself so as to block planet-obscuring starlight, and she takes solace in the alien beauty of exoplanets. At the same time, she discovers what feels every bit as wondrous: other people, reaching out across the space of her grief. Among them are the Widows of Concord, a group of women offering consolation and advice, and her beloved sons, Max and Alex. Most unexpected of all, there is another kind of one-in-a-billion match with an amateur astronomer. Equally attuned to the wonders of deep space and human connection, The Smallest Lights in the Universe is its own light in the dark.