Ascension

The latest book I'm reading from the public library is Ascension by British writer Nicholas Binge.

I was looking online for recent and good science fiction novels and saw it mentioned in a number of articles. I'm not far into it yet but I do like it. Here's a bit of a review from The New York Times ...

How Did a Mountain Bigger Than Everest Pop Up in the Pacific?

[...] The novel, Binge’s second and the first to be published in the United States, opens with a mystery. Harold Tunmore, a genius physicist, vanished decades ago, leaving a series of bizarre letters in the possession of his brother, Ben. When Ben is alerted to Harold’s presence in a psychiatric hospital, he finds his brother alive yet seemingly driven mad by his experiences. More of Harold’s letters are there, too. “No one can read them,” Harold warns. “If we should know what we are. …” That night, Harold burns himself alive.

This intriguing frame narrative is the first puzzle of many. The rest, and the bulk of the novel, are delivered in the form of Harold’s collected letters. Harold, an engaging narrator, describes being recruited in 1991 by a well-funded yet shady organization to explore an inexplicable phenomenon: A mountain far larger than Everest has appeared in the middle of the Pacific. “How does nobody know this is here?” Harold asks. “Until a couple months ago, it wasn’t,” he is told. Harold is coaxed along by the scientific enigma and a personal one: Waiting on the giant rock is his ex-wife, Dr. Naoko Tanaka, who is the last survivor of the previous expedition ....

Try it - you might like it :)