In Ascension

By: Martin MacInnes

Narrated by: Freya Miller

Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins

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

Complex, Philosophical

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

Couldve been so much more

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

Interconnectedness

In Ascension is story so full of nuance and unexpected shifts, full of themes describing and residing in circularity, interconnectedness, violence against each other and nature, and against things unknowable, and vastly more complex than were mostly willing to admit. This is a ginormous and a microscopic tale, both of which are about us, our relationships, the people and the environments that make us, and our planet in this universe. Everything is weighted out perfectly, the dialogue, the ruminations, the philosophy, the science and the fiction. It’s all relatable, urgent, and now.

Mild Spoilers: This book, surprisingly, is about family as much as it’s about the action that propels it forward as a science fiction story. It is never more this kind of tale than at the very end of the book when the narrator shifts to the elaborate on the views of the younger sister of the protagonist, and we receive a jarring and alternate view of the protagonist’s childhood, character, and supposed motivations. It’s enough to make you question what you’ve been reading and whether or not you’ve made some mistake in your sympathies. This seems to be intentional as this is exactly how families are in our real lives. We harbor secrets. We hold our realities so other family members can persist with theirs. We decide when and how to disclose facts that other family members have ignored, forgotten, minimized, or never even knew and then we build our lives around these truths or lies. These passages were instantly hard to consume, and I wanted to defend the protagonist and her experiences, her efforts, her choices and her resilience. I saw myself in her and was affected. So, good writing.

The reason to read this book would be to think and to feel and to ponder how we are connected to everything. Questions and assumptions pile up as the telling goes on and the reader is left alone with these and the pressing nature of existence in relation to other things that are also alive and that keep us alive.

A note about the narrator. She has a lovely voice and wonderful intonation. She begins the book with very noticeable breathiness at the beginnings of phrases. She inhales so sharply that I was at first easily distracted by it. It’s just lack of breath control and it comes and goes. I was mostly able to ignore it as the story is engrossing. I’d encourage you to listen past this flaw as the full reading of the book is excellent.

What was that?

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

Unsettling narration

The narrator had a strange way to her speech, pausing at random points and using awkward tones in conversations (and no, this had nothing to do with the Danish accent, which was lovely). Because of the pauses, it was hard to tell when sentences ended, so they all just dragged together. And the way she acted out people talking to each other seemed unnatural, almost like she’s never heard a real conversation. At times I wondered if this was even a real person and not an AI voiceover.

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.

Lots of navel gazing.

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