In Ascension

Leigh-Ann Hasenbosch grew up in Rotterdam under a violent father and a mathematician mother, escaping into the water whenever she could. As an adult she becomes a microbiologist working on the origins of life, and joins the crew of a research vessel investigating a newly charted vent in the Atlantic that seems to descend further than any trench yet measured.

What the expedition brings back sends her to a space agency in the Mojave desert, where a pattern of apparently unrelated phenomena around the world begins to resolve into something else. Offered a place on a long voyage away from Earth, Leigh has to choose between a family that is falling apart and a journey nobody is certain will end.

Martin MacInnes writes the vastness of deep time and deep space against the small, hard particulars of one life: a sister left behind, a mother's illness, the memory of a river. The novel won the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award, was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, and took Blackwell's Book of the Year and the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year.