Following up from his award-winning and critically acclaimed debut, Infinite Ground, Scottish novelist Martin MacInnes has written a deeply intelligent and thrilling novel on a family stalked by fear and uncertainty, and of a world both beautiful and terrible.
The world is heating up, species are dying out, and data collection is thriving.
Shel Murray, a primate researcher, is sent to lead a small team investigating suspicious deaths in one of the last remaining troops of bonobo chimpanzees. Establishing base in a national park controlled by an elusive conglomerate, the team encounter odd, then alarming behaviour, suggestions of an unknown predator, and they begin to consider their own safety.
Back at home, Shel's partner, John, a software engineer, is attacked, suffering head trauma. As he tries to rebuild his memory, in a remote house shrouded in fog, he starts to question not only the assault, but his present circumstances. How can he explain the fresh wounds on his body, and the activity he hears during the night? Can he really trust his doctor? And how much should he worry about the pattern of mould growing along the front of the house?
Through their respective projects, Shel and John must confront the threat they face. And a surprise event means that they have never had so much to lose as they have right now.
Industry Reviews
The best experimentalist now working -- Simon Ings * The Times *
Compelling, full of intriguing ideas, and yet retains an emotional sincerity and sensitivity... In terms of genre, MacInnes is gloriously promiscuous... covers everything from science-fiction to horror to dystopia, and manages to breeze through all this and more... It is written in a beautifully understated style - when you are dealing with big concepts, it's probably best to steer clear of too much flash prose - and will indubitably linger in my mind for a long time to come. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman *
MacInnes's writing is rigorous in its abstraction, yet there is a beauty to it, a quiet compassion. For all his gathering of evidence, he offers scant conclusions and in this he is like every one of us, sharing our fear for the future even as he charts its progress in meticulous detail. This novel confirms MacInnes as a writer of serious ambition and an uncanny degree of talent. * Guardian *
A ghost story, a novel of ideas whose allusiveness and vaguely defined foreboding gives it an unsettling power. * The Herald *
This book is mooted to be one of the best of 2020, featuring bonobo crime and one man's head trauma in an extinguishing world. * New Scientist *
Gathering Evidence makes a conspiracy theorist of the reader, sending them scavenging across the pages for clues and cyphers, for overlaps between strands which should be separate, for integrations and disintegrations. Gathering Evidence sits comfortably alongside peers such as Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World as a superbly current novel of 21st century pattern recognition, portraying a world where digital advancement and environmental devastation might be the same thing. * The List *
Remarkably prescient. MacInnes illustrates earth on the verge of extinction with stunning creativity and verve. * Book Riot *
MacInnes's intriguing second novel deserves to cement his reputation as a bold and curious writer * New Statesman *
MacInnes has created a strangely prescient vision that fuses risks of ecological catastrophe, technological dependence, and social isolation. * Sydney Morning Herald *
MacInnes's prose contains the novel's ratcheting urgency with an empiricist's precision. This is chaos in a specimen jar. * TLS *
