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Book Cover for: Sea of Tranquility, Emily St John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St John Mandel

Reader Score

93%

93% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 15 reviews on

2022 The New York Times Best Seller
Longlist:Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence -Fiction (2023)
Included in r/bookclub Reddit Book Club
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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
  • Publish Date: Apr 5th, 2022
  • Pages: 272
  • Language: English
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.60in - 1.10in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9780593321447
  • Categories: LiteraryScience Fiction - Apocalyptic & Post-ApocalypticScience Fiction - Time Travel

About the Author

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL's five previous novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives in New York City.

Critics’ reviews: