About In Ascension
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how – no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope – we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.
- Complete Title: In Ascension
- Format: Kindle Edition
- Language: English
- Number of Pages: 512
- Publication Time: February 2, 2023
- Publisher: Atlantic Books
- ISBN:
- ISBN13:
About Martin MacInnes
Martin MacInnes
Martin MacInnes lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. His debut novel, Infinite Ground (2016), won the Somerset Maugham Award. His second novel, Gathering Evidence (2020), led to his inclusion in The National Centre for Writing/British Council’s list of ten writers shaping the UK’s future. His third novel, In Ascension, was published in February 2023.
Reviews In Ascension
Longlisted for Booker Prize 2023 Book 4/13Well, I could not get into this literary SF. I tried the audio version and I could not follow the (boring to me) plot. And it barely touched the science when…
Adina
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023Okay, so let’s celebrate our tolerance for ambiguity: This ambitious sci-fi story is a possible Booker winner, it’s very well crafted – and I didn’t enjoy it one bi…
Meike
I’m fairly certain I’m not the right reader for this novel. In Ascension is getting a lot of love from readers here, and that is a good thing. The book is finding its people, and that’s sooooo importa…
Robin
4.5I don’t know what I’ve just read, and I don’t have nearly enough answers, but I really did love it… Exactly my kind of SF – it’s like Interstellar meets Arrival, meets Jeff VanderMeer. If you lik…
Emma
89th book of 2023.4.5. A stunning novel: epic in scope and almost cinematic in execution. Anyone who likes Interstellar will like this. What begins as a slow and dreamy account the narrator’s (Leigh)…
Matthew Ted
An intriguing start; the way the author writes science fiction about the present and the past, how it seeks out mysteries in the depths of the ocean rather than in the sky. Unfortunately, I don’t thin…
Flo
#12 of the 2023 Booker longlist for me to read – and now ranked … #1 :-O!!! Color me as surprised as anyone – even though I’d read and enjoyed Macinnes’ first novel, Infinite Ground, sci-fi is SOOOO…
Doug
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023I was not really aware of MacInnes before the Booker longlist was announced, but I found this one rather impressive. I am not a great reader of sci-fi, but this one…
Hugh
I read a newspaper review prior to picking this up that described this as a book about boredom and waiting, and that “MacInnes does lassitude and boredom very well”. The reviewer meant that as a c…