On a remote Hebridean island, a young boy grows up on his family's croft. His father mends watches while his mother works as a cleaner at a grand holiday house, a manor filled with hidden treasures and dark secrets that will echo across the boy's lifetime. His story is one layer of a symphonic journey through the deep reaches of time. From an English family observing a rare comet in 1955 to a woman standing in an Arctic seed vault as climate chaos rages, the lives of three generations are bound by a sublime truth: we do not merely inhabit our landscapes and histories, we are made and unmade by them.



Martin MacInnes is the author of three novels, most recently In Ascension, longlisted for The Booker Prize 2023, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Saltire award and Blackwell's Book of the Year, chosen as one of Barack Obama's ten best books of the year, and winner of the prestigious 2026 KAIROS Prize. He is published in 13 languages.



Astonishing... Beautifully written, richly atmospheric, full of brilliantly evoked detail... Nobody else writes like MacInnes



Monumental... It's that rare thing: a big, brawny novel of ideas that's actually readable



This is fiction which is both stellar and grounded; an exemplar of what the novel alone can still do



A shattering investigation of nothing less than humanity's place in the cosmos



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



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



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