‘So wise, so graceful, so rich. I loved Sea of Tranquility’ Naomi Alderman, author of The Power
The award-winning author of Station Eleven returns with a story of time travel that precisely captures the reality of our current moment . . .
In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling 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 time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat 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.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is a novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, that plays with the very line along which time should run. Perceptive and poignant about art, and love, and what we must do to survive, it is incredibly compelling.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Imprint: Picador
Publication date: 06/04/2023
Sea of Tranquility
by Emily St John Mandel
Review by Harriet
I loved the slow, mesmerising reveal of this looping novel about time travel, pandemics and human connection. Through the lens of a future pandemic, Mandel articulates the way our current Covid experience is shifting our expectations of time and travel. She masterfully captures the feeling that we’ve sleepwalked into a science fiction future both unsettlingly strange and deeply familiar. Reading this novel was like solving an immensely satisfying and wistfully nostalgic puzzle.
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