Atlantic buys The Fields from Booker-listed Martin MacInnes

James Roxburgh, Fiction Publisher at Atlantic Books, has bought UK Comm (excluding Canada) rights from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander to Martin MacInnes’ The Fields. US rights were bought by Sarah Jessica Parker and Maisie Cochran at Zando, Canadian rights by Anita Chong at McClelland & Stewart and Spanish rights by AdN. The Fields will be published in hardback in Spring 2027.

From The Booker Prize-longlisted author of In Ascension comes a sweeping, multigenerational novel of time and inheritance, violence and beauty, and the forging of the extractive world.

On a remote Hebridean island, a young boy grows up on his family’s croft. His father mends watches while his mother works as a cleaner at a grand holiday house, a manor filled with hidden treasures and dark secrets that will echo across the boy’s lifetime. His story is one layer of a symphonic journey through the deep reaches of time. From an English family observing a rare comet in 1955 to a woman standing in an Arctic seed vault as climate chaos rages, the lives of three generations are bound by a sublime truth: we do not merely inhabit our landscapes and histories, we are made and unmade by them.

Unforgettable and elemental, The Fields is a masterful portrait of family, the violence of the past, the roar of modernity and the mysteries of time and the human heart. Through its various parts and modes, MacInnes asks: what kind of novel meets the crises—political, ecological, existential—that we find ourselves in? Where do we turn next?

Martin MacInnes is the author of three novels, most recently In Ascension, longlisted for The Booker Prize 2023, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Saltire award and Blackwell’s Book of the Year, chosen as one of Barack Obama’s ten best books of the year, and winner of the prestigious 2026 KAIROS Prize. In Ascension was a Times bestseller and Atlantic Books has sold over 100,000 copies. He is published in 13 languages.

James Roxburgh, Fiction Publisher, says:

‘This is fiction on both intimate and epic scale, an invocation to live a life of more immediacy and meaning, and a stunning rewilding of our sense of time, our place in the cosmos, the strange contingency of our very existence. A child collecting fossils on a Scottish beach becomes a point of contact with 400 million years of our planet’s deep history. Martin MacInnes’s ambition, range and intelligence thrill me, and I think this novel further strengthens his claim as one of the most important British novelists of his generation.’

Emma Paterson, agent, says:

‘The Fields is a monumental achievement and a rare one: emotionally devastating and intellectually expansive, a piece of fiction that engages both heart and mind. The young boy at its centre is realised in such detail and with such intimacy that for me he now exists as a presence in the real world. It is a great privilege to be working with Martin MacInnes and has been hugely gratifying to see the passionate response from his three publishers in the English language.’

Kirsty Doole, Senior Publicity Director, says:

‘We ran a formidable campaign for In Ascension that resulted in brilliant press, engaged booksellers, and a swathe of new readers for Martin MacInnes’s work. Our plans for The Fields are even more ambitious and we’ll be launching a creative and unmissable publicity and marketing campaign in the coming months. Martin MacInnes is a stunning writer and I’m excited about what we can achieve.’