Sea of Tranquility

A Novel

By: Emily St. John Mandel

Narrated by: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter

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.

Superb

I have enjoyed at least 3 of Mandel's prior novels and this one is maybe the best. I was transfixed. It all comes together toward the end. I rarely write reviews but I have to this time - even the narration is perfect.

Not My Favorite Sci-Fi!

Too slow. Would not recommend although I
like Science Fiction. Did show the dangers of time travel.

Stay to the end

I love how the story gets wrapped up in the end. Includes characters from the Glass Hotel. A lovely read.

Fantastic!!

What a book! One of my all time favorite books now. I’ll listen to it again.

It’s getting better all the time

So much better than the underdeveloped, over praised “Station Eleven.” Evidently the author has gotten over her timidity regarding science fiction. It’s not going to leave a mark that won’t wash off, after all. As a result, this new book retains the literary tone and quality for which the author is known while making good use of genre characteristics like broadly convincing world building world building and something akin to plot. Kudos. Maybe the next one will merit five stars