This is one of those books I just don’t get. I was vaguely interested in it when I first read the blurb – I like the idea of marine biology and discovering organisms we didn’t know existed. That part was somewhat interesting. But the rest… I guess I didn’t read it too closely. So I wasn’t prepared for the sci-fi and space program elements. But let’s back up.
As the blurb describes, this is the life story of a woman who grew up in an abusive home in Rotterdam, where she was surrounded by threat from water and flood. Her father worked on managing the dams that protected her city, and she grew up absorbing his violent outbursts and frustrations – literally. Her mother was a brilliant mathematician, but not best suited to parenthood. She preferred spending time working and seemed perplexed by the needs of her two young daughters. She failed to protect Leigh from her father, and was more absent than present. But during her childhood, Leigh was drawn to water. She formed a connection with it that would lead to her lifelong work with the sea and the life forms that live there.
The main story arch of the book begins when she’s on a research vessel that is present to discover a previously unmapped trench in the ocean. But it’s not just a trench, it’s a chasm of unfathomable depth that defies human understanding and experience. She’s one of the team who enters the ocean, and one who subsequently falls ill upon returning to the boat. Those who suffer the illness experience varied symptoms including delirium and fever. The strangest part of the illness, however, seems to be an uncontrollable urge to return to the water, one which Leigh herself has to contend with.
During this expedition, a new life form was discovered that would form an important part in helping to make long-term space travel possible. Leigh is recruited to the space program because of her expertise and experience, and becomes completely absorbed in her work, even as she doesn’t know exactly what she’s working for or towards.
Meanwhile, as she’s lost in her work, Leigh’s family is dealing with changes. Her mother has started behaving erratically, and her sister is concerned about her, and frustrated with Leigh’s lack of perceived willingness to come home to help take care of her. Leigh seems to wilfully choose to deny the reality of her mother’s decline, deciding instead to focus on work – work she’s banned from discussing with anyone, including her family.
For me, this relationship was the most interesting part of the book. Leigh is more like her mother than she knows, and while they have never been close, she seems to understand how to reach out to her mother. She takes to recording her life – sometimes talking, sometimes just leaving the recorder on while she goes about her day. These recordings that she sends to her mother seem to offer something soothing and calming, and allow her mother to fall asleep listening to her daughter’s life in the background. It’s odd, and yet deeply touching. I loved this part of the book, and how tender this connection is between the two women.
The book continues on with a space journey and then Leigh’s sister’s subsequent search for information about what happened to Leigh and what she was working on. We see her grapple with her sense of loss and the difficulty of grieving a loss that is undefined and without explanation. Is her sister alive? Is she sequestered in a government facility somewhere? If so, what is she doing there? These are the unanswered and unanswerable questions she seeks to resolve.
Now, as to how I felt about this book – and this is the really tricky bit. I’m so torn on this book. There were moments of it that I felt captured something beautifully – like the relationship between mother and daughter expressed through background noise, the perfect medium for two women who had very little in the way of emotional scope. The exploration of the sisters’ relationship as it revolves around their past and their mother is also gorgeously written. If this had been the entire point of the book, I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it. But the sci-fi parts of it were just impenetrable. To the point where at times I didn’t even really follow what was going on. It could have been suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat stuff, and yet somehow it ended up being pages and pages of boring scientific discussion. I kept comparing it in my mind to how the science was presented in books like Project Hail Mary – it was likewise scientifically complicated, but was still written in a way that could be followed and make sense to the reader. And it was used in order to further the plot and up the ante. But in this book it was just this long-winded pseudo-scientific palaver that lost me early on and had me rolling my eyes and just waiting for it to be over. It started on the initial marine exploration and worsened throughout the space program – but the space journey, which should have been gripping, was so densely written and made so little sense that I was just bored. Worse than that, I didn’t care one jot what happened to any of the characters – or even earth – by the end of it. If it hadn’t been a BookTube Prize book I was reading as part of my judging, I would not have finished it at all.
Of course it’s quite possible this was a me problem. I’m not a mathy or sciencey person. I don’t go after sci-fi. I don’t love space stories, nor do I enjoy disaster/apocalypse stories in general. The style of writing of this book is the kind that often alienates me. I like snappy prose, and a plot that moves forward with noticeable momentum and/or depth of character development and emotional investment. This book did not deliver these things. The prose was probably gorgeous, but to me hit as overwritten in places, sometimes at the expense of a plot that made sense. But then again, it was nominated for the Booker Prize and has received lots of accolades, so it’s very possible I’m just missing something. If you’re a MacInnes fan, or if this story strikes your fancy and you like heavily descriptive, slightly impenetrable writing, this will probably be exactly your type of book! For my part, however, I just did not enjoy this reading experience at all.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has also read this – what am I missing? Did you love it? Anyone else have a similar response?
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. – Goodreads
Book Title: In Ascension
Author: Martin MacInnes
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook (Audible)
Published By: Black Cat
Released: February 27, 2024 (First Published on April 3, 2023)
Genre: Fiction, Speculative, Apocalypse, Sci-Fi, Climate Change
Pages: 496
Date Read: April 5-13, 2025
Rating: 4.5/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.76/5 (12,407 ratings)
BookTube Prize Judging Quarterfinals 2025 Rank: 6/6