In Ascension

By: Martin MacInnes

Narrated by: Freya Miller

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

What was that?

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

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.

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!

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. .

Couldve been so much more

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

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.

Unexpected story

A lot of time spent on character psychology, which was positive and negative. Fun listen tho

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.

Poor narration of a mediocre sci-fi

The book starts strong but throws away much of the nuance for a vague and rambling ending. Narrator pronounced many things incorrectly and had a rather boring voice.

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?