Gathering Evidence

With extinction imminent, researchers visit an exclusive national park to observe one of the last troops of bonobo chimpanzees. Amid unusual behaviour and unexplained deaths, Shel Murray suspects her team is being hunted. Back at home, Shel's partner is attacked touring their new property. Amnesiac and quarantined, John is visited by an inscrutable doctor, tending to the still fresh wounds. As his memory returns, John questions not only the assault, but the renewed marks on his body, and the black fungus now growing on the walls.



A sudden event changes everything. Shel is interrogated over the expedition in the park; John throws himself into work, developing new software. Together, with a greater understanding of how much they have to lose, they face a grave threat, something that promises to devour everything.



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. He lives in Edinburgh.



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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.



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.



A ghost story, a novel of ideas whose allusiveness and vaguely defined foreboding gives it an unsettling power.



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.



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.



Remarkably prescient. MacInnes illustrates earth on the verge of extinction with stunning creativity and verve.



MacInnes's intriguing second novel deserves to cement his reputation as a bold and curious writer



MacInnes has created a strangely prescient vision that fuses risks of ecological catastrophe, technological dependence, and social isolation.



MacInnes's prose contains the novel's ratcheting urgency with an empiricist's precision. This is chaos in a specimen jar.