There is more than just violence while Leigh is growing up. The world is teetering from a culture of disconnection epitomized by her father, Geert. He smashes objects against the wall and beats her. He is driven by grievance, about the sacrifices he made to be a father and about a climate he can no longer understand—temperatures are rising, seasons overlapping, a month's worth of rain falling on a single day. Leigh finds solace when she swims in the nearby ocean, submerged in rising sea. "There was no gap separating my body from the living world."

Martin MacInnes's third novel, In Ascension (Black Cat, 2024), is a searching, deeply empathetic work of literature—a story about one woman's struggle to find connection in a world that is tearing itself apart. In this cross-genre epic, MacInnes seamlessly blends grand tropes from science fiction (Leigh's journey takes place both on and eventually off our planet) with probing philosophical meditations about what gets lost when we lose contact with one another and the natural world around us.

Leigh becomes a marine biologist and joins an expedition to investigate a mysterious deep-sea vent. What the team finds in the huge trench is shocking, even otherworldly. The discovery leads Leigh to work on a secret project in the Mojave Desert that is related to the trench. It turns out there are other phenomena like it that could point to the origins of life. But to continue with the project, Leigh will have to walk away from everything, even her sister and their ill mother. Still, she's determined to transcend the wall that's been deeply rooted between herself and the world since childhood. Since Geert. She finds it in ascension, "bodies rising and lifting off the ground, all of us airborne, all of us unlimited."