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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
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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.

What listeners say about In Ascension

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

What was that?

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

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

deadly slow even at 1.25x

It's hard to really evaluate this book because the narration is just dreadful: wispy, breathy, slow and sing-songish.. I never speed up audiobooks, but I would never have finished it at 1x. Overall I felt the book was largely aimless, lacking in texture and detail, and slow to develop anything resembling a real plot. There were moments... but I have no idea what the point of it was. Life is endless and amazing? We all die but the universe goes on? Family matters, but not all that much?

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Interesting characters, good science fiction, naïve ending

This was a very good book with strong character development and an excellent, very believable Science Fiction storyline, and even some realistic, barely fiction physics and agricultural science and engineering. The ending was childish and displayed an utter lack of understanding, chemistry, and molecular biology. I wanted to scream to the author to go back and come up with a much more believable and interesting ending to cap off this very good book. It is almost as if the author got lazy intellectually and just decided to finish the book!

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

Moony, Swoony, Turgid.

A slog of ponderous faux wisdom and almost random character description, this science fiction epic does not understand physics nor astrophysics and wastes my time.
I regret that the narrator, with her beautiful, yet over the top plummy received English accent was not closely on a tour to make sure that she use the correct words. Not her fault – but the director’s.
Overwritten pile of words hiding a lack of real content. .

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

I often yelled at my car soeaker to get to the point

Ok, this got the Booker Prize.i figured it must be good. i have a masters degree but i was often cconfused. The author is a wonderful wordsmith. but it would have been twice as good if it had been half as long. There were some moments of awe and wonder. Those were good moments. But the ending was very confusing. It left me confused about how the characters got there and exactly where and when they were! And the two characters that were the main focus of the last section was.jarring. I was disappointed.

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

Bagins well, but ultimately disappoints.

this was an interesting book for 80% of its length and then it falls apart, completely, and leaves you unsatisfied. read only if you like literary ficion and ambiguous resolutions.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Annoying reader

The story is fascinating and the writing is good, but the reader’s plodding pace and song-song voice — and the silly accents used for some of the characters — drove me away from this audiobook. I’ll check the novel out of the library.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    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
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Human centered science fiction

Story is boring. Human aspect of science interesting .
Life is circular. The end is a beginning.

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