Martin Macinnes

In Ascension (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE

An astonishing novel about a young microbiologist investigating an unfathomable deep vent in the ocean floor, leading her on a journey that will encompass the full trajectory of the cosmos and the passage of a single human life



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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Grove Atlantic
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Februar 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780802163479
• Artikelnr.: 68789456

Autorenporträt

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.

Rezensionen

Praise for In Ascension:

"A substantial work, carefully paced and plotted...There is an elegant symmetry to the novel, which balances Leigh's stratospheric career against the collapse of her personal relationship... [MacInnes'] novels have an unusual sobriety, a serious atmosphere, and a searching quality. The prose is clean and spare but rarely designed to impress; there's wisdom rather than cleverness in the storytelling."-Daisy Hildyard, New York Review of Books

"[A] capacious, broody work of speculative fiction."-The New Yorker

"Astonishing . . .Beautifully written, richly atmospheric, full of brilliantly evoked detail,never sacrificing the grounded verisimilitude of lived experience to its vastmysteries, but also capturing a numinous, vatic strangeness that hints atgenuine profundities about life."-Guardian

"Mind-altering... On nearly every page, details arise from thenovel and demand their own attention, rather than only contributing to a scene.... In a book filled with substantial literary achievements, In Ascension'sprimary achievement is sustaining this appreciative sensitivity throughout itspages, inviting readers to be fascinated by every detail in its world, and thenequally fascinated by the world around them." -Dan Kubis, The Brooklyn Rail

"A thought-provoking story of underwater and outer space exploration. . . . MacInnes ensures readers never lose sight of what Leigh calls 'the generosity of porous life.' This brims with humanity."-Publishers Weekly

"I don't think I've ever read a book that was as profoundand moving at every scale - the cell, the family, the universe. A remarkable,expansive, stunning achievement."-Karen Joy Fowler

"Ashattering investigation of nothing less than humanity's place in the cosmos."-Daily Mail

"The richness of the novel is endlessly rewarding. InAscension is a far-reaching epic that blends a deep scientific knowledgewith a wide-eyed wonder at our place in the universe." FinancialTimes

"InAscension finds as much poetry in the human microbiome as it does inthe grand revolutions of the planets. It is a love letter to life... a primer tomarvel."-Times Literary Supplement

"A gorgeous, sombre epic, worthy of its precursors inStanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard, Olaf Stapledon and Stanley Kubrick. It will be ofcommanding interest to all whose ears prick up at those names, or any readerhungry to see the novel's cosmic and intimate dimensions reconciledwith seemingly effortless grace." Jonathan Lethem

"Martin McInnes's imagination knows no bounds: he unites theunplumbed depths of the oceans to the infinity of interstellar space inhis bravura, breathtaking, audacious In Ascension. Like TedChiang's Story of Your Life, and Jeff VanderMeer's Southern ReachTrilogy, this is an instant classic. Read it and feel awe andwonder." Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom

"Monumental . . . In Ascension rarely slipsfrom G-inducing pace. It's that rare thing: a big, brawny novel of ideasthat's actually readable. And for that considerable achievement, MacInnesdeserves praise. It's no small thing, after all, to reach for the stars." Telegraph

"One of the best sci-fi novels I've read for ages . . . Transcendent."-New Scientist

"Itsintellectual daring is formidable. This is fiction which is both stellar andgrounded; an exemplar of what the novel alone can still do."-The Scotsman
"In Ascension is strewn withjaw-dropping ideas . . . I'm still chewing over them." Spectator

"Awondrous, hypnotic book."-Ned Beauman, author of VenomousLumpsucker

"Laura Jean McKay, Colson Whitehead and Emily St John Mandel are serious novelists . . . crafting extraordinary and original speculative fiction. To thatlist, add Martin MacInnes." SFX (UK)

"An absorbing, serious, and wonderful novel. It will stay with you."-Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency

"An extraordinary novel - planetary and beyond planetary. The salt andblood, the tide and the bloom, the stuff of the world, will haunt you."-JMLedgard, author of Submergence

"Truly incredible. Beautiful and moving. A masterpiece."-LeeRourke, author of Glitch