Sea of Tranquility

A novel

by Emily St. John Mandel

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. 

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. 

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

My thoughts:

“… I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
Sea of Tranquility is part pandemic balm for the soul, part companion piece to The Glass Hotel, part Station Eleven meta book tour and of course, part time travel mystery. I love Emily St. John Mandel’s books and I feel very honored that I’ve been granted an ARC by the Knopf Doubleday Poublishing Group. The Sea of Tranquility was a joy to read, specially as a fan, just reading the name Vincent again her role in The Glass Hotel made me realize I was in for a fascinating journey not only through time and space but through Mandel’s own work as well.

A journalist asks the writer in the story what’s it like to be an author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic. I now wonder how Emily St. John Mandel feels about being an author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic while publishing a new novel set partially during the actual pandemic we’re still living through now.

This book is a pleasure to read, playful, fun and of this very moment.