Sea of Tranquility

A Novel

By: Emily St. John Mandel

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

Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2022 Emily St. John Mandel (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, Goodreads, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Oprah Daily, LitHub, USA Today, San Francisco Examiner, Glamour, Mother Jones, Esquire, The Millions, TOR.com, The Weather Channel, and Kirkus

CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE • ON PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SUMMER READING LIST

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: TIME, Today.com, Oprah.com, Bloomberg, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Fortune, Glamour, Buzzfeed, Good Housekeeping, Vulture, Bustle, Lit Hub, Medium, Parade, PopSugar, Tech Radar, TOR.com and more

"In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and…project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart…Born of…empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this ‘green-and-blue world’ and who one day might live well beyond." —Laird Hunt, The New York Times

"Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandel’s previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuries…Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling…Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting—the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction’—to a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction." —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

Another Masterpiece by Emily St. John Mandel

absolutely loved this from start to finish. It kept me riveted during my weekend road trip, it was the perfect antidote for a long boring drive.

I would highly recommend reading Glass Hotel before this as two of its main characters (Vincent and Paul) and one minor character (Mirella) in that novel play an important role in Sea of Tranquility and this novel will make much more sense if you understand their relationships to each other and what happened between them.

This book was right up my alley, with its melancholy tone and time travel / science fiction aspects. The book jumps back and forth in time from 1912 Canada, to 2203 Moon colony, to 2020 America, to 2403 or so America, with stops along the way at several other in-between years. The different plot threads don't seem to have any connection at first but but the end of the novel everything the author pulled the threads together in a most impressive way and I was blown away. For such a short novel there is a lot to follow but if you can keep track the payoff is wonderful.

I really enjoyed how the author filled in the background of Vincent and Mirella's relationship early on. Readers of the The Glass Hotel are familiar with what happened to them and their respective husbands, and how their last meeting played out, but in Sea of Tranquility we relive this all from Mirella's point of view. And we learn of Mirella's attempts to track down Vincent and Paul. As a fanatic of The Glass Hotel I was instantly hooked and spellbound.

The novel is told through a number of different points of view- most notably the aforementioned Mirella, a 20th century Englishman named Edwin, a 23rd century author named Olive, and a 25th century security guard/investigator named Gaspery. The plot is built around what seems to be a glitch in time which affects the main characters in their respective eras. I can't say anything more without encroaching on spoiler territory. How the author ties these characters and their threads together was marvelous. The author has a way with character development and smoothly flowing prose which is easy to digest.

The Audible audiobook was narrated by FOUR excellent narrators (including Dylan Moore who also read The Glass Hotel) which really added to the experience. Wow. They made this come to life. It was just so well done. This sort of genre fiction isn't for everyone but was perfect for me. I just can't stop thinking about it. If you liked Glass Hotel I would recommend springing for an Audible credit and listening to this. Right away.

Good story!

This is a neat story. It starts by showing you the pieces of a puzzle and then slowly piecing them together in a deeply meaningful way.

Short, but great story

Drew me in from the beginning! Starts with a lot of characters and times so had to pay attention, but quickly made sense.

Deeply satisfying

Another fascinating interwoven story by St. John Mandel. Pay attention early on, since it will matter later.

Another multidimensional multiple character emigmatic novel that will lose you if you don’t pay close attention

Time travel thru the centuries on and off of Earth, post Apocalypse life challenges, and a bid to the value of “doing the humane and right rhing” all present in this confusing novel. Just as with Station Eleven, It seemed likely that many disparate stories would finally come together. I almost gave up on the book when I was only 1/3 into it and still meeting new characters. However I hung in there through another third, still wondering if I was glad that I had read this book. Finally there is intersection of multiple paths and it becomes far more entertaining. I recommend the reader to have patience and they will be rewarded.

Intriguing science fiction with a dash of pandemic

Author Mandel interweaves plot lines and characters over several centuries, resulting in an imaginative tale from the past to the future. She has a knack for creating sympathetic characters, and this novel differs from "Station Eleven" in that the society we experience, while far from perfect, is not a dystopia, and hope and optimism are pervasive.

Just not for me

If I hadn't been through a pandemic myself I may have been more into this book. The reliving of lockdown and mentions of COVID just turned me off from the story. Otherwise it wasn't a bad book at all!

Confusing but entertaining

I enjoy Saint John Mandel however I struggled with this book. It wasn't the John rebending I actually really enjoyed that part. It was more of the fact that I had trouble keeping all the characters straight. I will be doing another read through at some point in the future.

It could have been further developed

Somehow, I found the story progression to be rushed. I would have liked to have listened to the characters better developed. After all, the story spanned several generations and millions of miles.

Time travel books are always a bit tedious

I enjoyed parts of this book but found myself wishing it would end so I could start something else. I didn’t realize it was a book about time travel which inevitably is filled with cheap tricks