When anthropologist Hugh Raffles's two sisters died suddenly within weeks of one another, he reached for rocks as reassuringly solid objects, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own. His book is grounded in stories of specific stones and their intimate relationships to human activity - the seam of marble under Manhattan prized by its native Lenape people, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified blubber on Svalbard's beaches left by the brutal 19th-century whaling industry - culminating in the heart-breaking story of six Inuit adventurers Robert Peary transported from Greenland to display alongside a huge iron-ore meteorite in 1890s New York.