Sea of Tranquility

By Emily St. John Mandel

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - 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.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593321448
• ISBN13: 9780593321447
• Release Date: April 2022
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Did not see the twist coming!

At about 80% I was convinced I’d be giving this 3⭐️ because it really took me about 50% to get into it. It was a slow start, but it’s worth it. The way the author brings it all back and zips it up perfectly was unexpected but somehow I’m stunned I didn’t see it coming. I personally believe time travel is on a closed loop so I particularly loved the ending. It was perfectly satisfying. When we finally understand, it feels like time is like a piece of paper, folding over on itself.