Michael Marshall is a British science journalist whose articles regularly appear in Observer, Nature, New Scientist, and Telegraph. He is also the editor of the BBC Earth website, widely known television channel specializing in science documentary. “The Great Quest” is Marshall’s first book—a long-standing passion project about the global problem of the origins of life on Earth (or not on Earth, but somewhere deep in space?). The author has conducted many interviews with researchers, studied the legacy of those who timidly questioned how life began in the past centuries—and was surprised to find that serious science became interested in finding an answer to this question only at the beginning of the last century. There are many theories about the origin of living things, fierce disputes continue, and the author analyzes the hypotheses in detail—many of which seem quite exotic.