Martin MacInnes was born in Inverness in 1983. He is the author of Infinite Ground and Gathering Evidence, and he is the winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and a Manchester Fiction Prize. In 2020 he was selected by the Guardian/British Council as One of Ten Writers Shaping the UK's Future. He lives in Edinburgh.
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
*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
*Telegraph*
I would sincerely hope to see In Ascension on various prize
shortlists... Its intellectual daring is formidable. This is
fiction which is both stellar and grounded; an exemplar of what the
novel alone can still do
*The Scotsman*
A shattering investigation of nothing less than humanity's place in
the cosmos
*Daily Mail*
A tremendous novel that takes you to surprising places so carefully
that you don't notice until everything has changed
*The Times*
Mesmerising... Profoundly humane... In Ascension is epic in scale,
diving to the bottom of the deepest ocean and then up to the
furthest reaches of the universe
*Sunday Times*
To the handful of recent classics such as Richard Powers' The
Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future
can be added Martin MacInnes' In Ascension... The richness of the
novel is endlessly rewarding. In Ascension is a far-reaching epic
that blends a deep scientific knowledge with a wide-eyed wonder at
our place in the universe
*Financial Times*
In Ascension finds as much poetry in the human microbiome as it
does in the grand revolutions of the planets. It is a love letter
to life...a primer to marvel
*The TLS*
In Ascension is strewn with jaw-dropping ideas... I'm still chewing
over them
*Spectator*
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*
Martin McInnes's imagination knows no bounds: he unites the
unplumbed depths of the oceans to the infinity of interstellar
space in his bravura, breathtaking, audacious In Ascension. No
novel I know has conveyed, in such a shiveringly exciting and
original way, that old truth: We are all made of stardust. Like Ted
Chiang's 'Story of Your Life', and Jeff VanderMeer's 'Southern
Reach Trilogy', this is an instant classic. Read it and feel awe
and wonder.
*Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom*
A gorgeous, sombre epic, worthy of its precursors in Stanislaw Lem,
J.G. Ballard, Olaf Stapledon and Stanley Kubrick. It will be of
commanding interest to all whose ears prick up at those names, or
any reader hungry to see the novel's cosmic and intimate dimensions
reconciled with seemingly effortless grace
*Jonathan Lethem*
Nothing else in contemporary fiction compares to the mind state
induced in you by a Martin MacInnes novel. You're simultaneously
lulled by his prose, which is noiseless and unerring like some kind
of billion-dollar lab tech, and maintained in a state of constant
low-level disorientation by his completely unpredictable choices,
his mysteries left audaciously unanswered. In Ascension is a
wondrous, hypnotic book by one of my favourite working authors
*Ned Beauman, author of Venomous Lumpsucker*
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
and blood, the tide and the bloom, the stuff of the world, will
haunt you
*JM Ledgard, author of Submergence*
Truly incredible. Beautiful and moving. A masterpiece
*Lee Rourke, author of Glitch*
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