Atlantic pre-empts 'stunning' software developer story from MacInnes

Atlantic Books has pre-empted a second novel by Scottish author Martin MacInnes, a "stunning literary investigation" about a software developer who suffers a head trauma.

Atlantic Fiction Senior Editor James Roxburgh acquired world rights from Rachel Conway at Georgina Capel Associates. Gathering Evidence will be published in hardback and e-book in February 2020.

"A software developer suffers head trauma after being attacked monitoring the construction of his new property, the synopsis reads. "While his partner leads an investigation into mysterious, violent deaths in one of the last remaining troops of wild bonobos, increasingly uncertain of her safety, he finds his sense impressions profoundly altered, attended to by a strange and elusive doctor."

Atlantic said Gathering Evidence is a stunning literary investigation of a young family, the collapse of the natural world, and the boom of digital data collection. 

MacInnes’ critical debut, Infinite Ground, was shortlisted for the Saltire Awards and won a 2017 Somerset Maugham award. He previously won the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. He lives in Fife.

Roxburgh described the author as "one of the most enquiring and thoughtful writers of his generation".

He added: "Gathering Evidence brings together the scattered lights of biodiversity, consciousness, birth, extinction, memory and obsession, and recombines them into a dazzling fiction about the slender grace and precarity of our being."