Sea of Tranquility: A novel

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, 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.\n“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times\nEdwin 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.\nTwo 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.\nWhen 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.\nA 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.\nAmazon.com Review\nAn Amazon Best Book of April 2022: Sea of Tranquility surprised me, and it will likely surprise the most ardent Emily St. John Mandel fan. I mean that in a good way. The pristine writing is there, as is her ability to create intimate portraits at the same time she is addressing the big, essential questions of existence. But there’s a little more freedom to the writing. Emily St. John Mandel is a novelist who has written herself to a very high level. I won’t get too much into plot, but the book is told in multiple time periods, including the far future; there are characters who will be recognized from her previous work; and there is a pandemic angle that’s satisfying and well-told. Readers who have always really liked her work will likely fall in love after reading Sea of Tranquility (those in love will stay in love). If you haven’t read her work, think about picking up this one. I can’t wait to see what she does next. —Chris Schluep, Amazon Editor