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In Ascension  By  cover art

In Ascension

By: Martin MacInnes
Narrated by: Freya Miller
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Publisher's summary

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.

©2023 Martin MacInnes. Recorded by arrangement with Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2023 W.F. Howes, Ltd

About the Author

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.

About the Performer

Freya Miller is an award-winning Danish-born actress, trained and based in London. She was shortlisted for the UK Radio Drama Festival 2023 with a Sylvia Plath monologue. She narrates for the acclaimed app Sleep Cycle. In 2024 she will be featured on rock band Nestor’s upcoming album. In 2021 Freya won a Voice Arts Award for playing a vampire in the video game Bloodlines 2. She also won Telly Awards in 2022 and 2023.

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    4 out of 5 stars

Complex, Philosophical

It took me a while to get well and truly hooked, but once it got me, I couldn’t stop listening.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Couldve been so much more

With a better story or plot this couldve been so much more. Its just… nothing happens. Like, at all.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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What was that?

Very annoying. Kept waiting for something to happen, but fell asleep. And the end…what?

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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  • 03-18-24

Not enough science

First person narrative; minimal dialog and much uninteresting introspection. Review suggested ir was about deep ocean and deep space exploration. Very little science. One of only two books I have returned in the past 15 years.

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    1 out of 5 stars

Lots of navel gazing.

This book is primarily psycobabble about main character's childhood and relationship with her sister. Boring.

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