In Ascension with Martin MacInnes - Ticket-Only Option

This is the ticket-only option for this event. To buy a copy of the book and get your free ticket, please click here.

Thursday 2nd February at 18:30

We are thrilled to celebrate and welcome Martin MacInnes for the launch of his exciting new novel In Ascension. He will be joined in conversation by Tom Pow.

We will follow up on your purchase with an email with more details on the event, which will be held at St Vincent's Chapel on St Stephen Street.

About In Ascension

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.

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 so she faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or
to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

About Martin MacInnes

Martin MacInnes was born in Inverness in 1983. He has an MA from the University of York, has read at international science and literature festivals, and is the winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the 2014 Manchester Fiction Prize. In 2021 he was selected by the Guardian/British Council as One of Ten Writers Shaping the
UK's Future. He lives in Edinburgh. His previous two novels are Infinite Ground (2016) and Gathering Evidence (2020).