Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
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.
Publisher: Atlantic BooksISBN: 9781838956240Number of pages: 512Weight: 654 gDimensions: 210 x 148 x 36 mmEdition: Main
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Astonishing... Beautifully written,richly atmospheric,full of brilliantly evoked detail,never sacrificing the grounded verisimilitude of lived experience to its vast mysteries,but also capturing a numinous,vatic strangeness that hints at genuine profundities about life. Nobody else writes like MacInnes,and this magnificent book is his best yet'- The Guardian
'Monumental... In Ascension rarely slips from G-inducing pace. It's that rare thing: a big,brawny novel of ideas that's actually readable. And for that considerable achievement,MacInnes deserves praise. It's no small thing,after all,to reach for the stars'- The Telegraph
'Laura Jean McKay,Colson Whitehead and Emily St John Mandel are serious novelists...crafting extraordinary and original speculative fiction. To that list,add Martin MacInnes'- SFX
'I don't think I've ever read a book that was as profound and moving at every scale - the cell,the family,the universe. In Ascension is a remarkable,expansive,stunning achievement'- Karen Joy Fowler,author of Booth
'An awe-inspiring and gripping epic'- Graeme Macrae Burnet,author of Case Study
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