Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility

By Emily St. John Mandel

  • Release Date: 2022-04-05
  • Genre: Literary Fiction
Score: 4
4
From 1,416 Ratings

Description

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.

Reviews

  • A masterpiece

    5
    By JLamb2016
    The only issue is this book is too short. Intimately human and thought provoking. Super readable, and I wish there was more here.
  • Flows slow but deep

    4
    By Choralriff
    This one didn’t capture me with its characters, and I wasn’t very into it for the first half of the book. But then it turns and redeems itself very well. Slow burn, but very interesting.
  • Read in One Sitting

    5
    By asapr212
    It’s been a long time since I read an entire book in an afternoon, or one as fascinating. Well written, smart, occasionally funny and very thought provoking, I am sure I will read it again … and again.
  • Sea of Tranquility

    5
    By Paulimeepa
    Brilliant, beautifully written, perfectly plotted. You’ll guess the crux before it’s revealed, but will revel in the confirmation. Better than Station Eleven, tighter structure.
  • Second half made up for a slow start

    4
    By ueb63$:&&
    Well written but I struggled to sustain interest … until I became engaged by my emerging understanding of what was going on
  • Loved it

    5
    By Dwyer222
    While her faith in humanity’s perseverance is far greater than mine, her futurist work has a stark realism to it that makes it totally believable. This is a quick read if you’re not careful to savor the details. Enjoy it! I did.
  • Good read

    4
    By vijaykrishnn
    It is great to read a story that gives a new perspective of our future where pandemics are a reality. Overall well written, not really a thriller but it’s wonderful to travel through time.
  • Reality is what you make it

    4
    By Richard Bakare
    The Netflix show “Black Mirror” accelerated my desire to read this book. Only because the title “Sea of Tranquility” is an Easter Egg in many episodes. Though not the same “Sea of Tranquility” referenced in the show I figured it had some important revelatory meaning all the same. This fast and engaging read that definitely offered its own revelatory moments. One of those instances sheds new light on what each episode of Black Mirror could mean. The insights can be distilled down to interactions that raise questions on being and the nature of reality. If you know Black Mirror then you discerning if life is a simulation is a compelling puzzle to figure out. The most important ask is how do we know what is real and what is not? Emily St. John Mandel uses multiple clever uses of language, pacing, and timeline to tie multiple short stories and characters together into a common thread. The ending of which will either leave you vexed or in a soothing calm; having released your need to define reality.
  • I loved this so much

    5
    By Christy333
    I am still not sure if I can even begin to comprehend what I read…but I am moved. I felt this story in my heart, so much that it hurts a little.
  • All the world’s a stage . . .

    4
    By Scott's take on things
    This book is about time travel and the possibility that our reality is merely simulation. The government, through the Time Institute, owns a time travel machine and uses it to investigate irregularities that occur at different points in time and to investigate the simulation hypothesis — that our “reality” is really a simulation, which may be why the irregularities occur. The author sets the novel in several different time periods and connects the pieces and characters at a good dramatic pace. The writing is crisp and sparse, not flashy. But I was drawn to the characters and story and had a hard time putting this book down.