‘Monumental’ Telegraph
‘Magnificent’ Guardian
‘Transcendent’ New Scientist
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 512
Imprint: Atlantic Books UK
Publication date: 01/02/2024
Martin MacInnes has won the Arthur C Clarke Award for his novel In Ascension. Read Harriet’s review here.
Dr Andrew M. Butler, the award’s Chair of Judges said, ‘In Ascension shows us, in the words of one judge, “vistas between the cellular and the cosmic.” It’s an intense trip and for once it’s a winner that is in the tradition of Clarke’s own novels.’
‘From the ocean floor to outer space, an astonishing novel examines our place in the universe’ Adam Roberts , The Guardian (UK).
In Ascension
by Martin MacInnes
Review by Harriet
Breathtaking and confounding in scope, this novel combines science fiction and natural history with meditations on memory, belonging and grief. The writing is rich and absorbing and though it moves slowly and I’m not sure I completely understood it all, the pleasure of my mind being stretched and the residual feeling of alertness to the remarkable world around us, was payoff enough. For those who enjoyed Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, The Overstory by Richard Powers and the film Arrival.
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