New Release Notes: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, 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 [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times

Writers, when they are at the top of their craft, are discussed in the same breath as clairvoyants and soothsayers for their ability to look into the future and see what can be. From Isaac Asimov's prediction of mass computerization and Mark Twain's prophetic foretelling of a little thing known as the internet, writers have always looked into the future and asked 'what can be'.

But what if you predict something terrible? Emily St. John Mandel did just that - when her fifth book, The Glass Hotel, came out in early 2020, no one wanted to talk about her newest release; they were obsessed with her older work, Station Eleven, in which a pandemic kills 90% of the population and the people who are left must discover and cleave what it means to be human.

In her newest, Sea of Tranquility, Mandel tackles a pandemic again but in a different way than before, with, what else, methodical world building and time travel. Mandel has never been better; this book is a virtuosic performance of wordplay and storytelling, deftly weaving three narratives across (literal) space and time. The story follows a steamship traveler getting lost in the Canadian wilderness in 1912, a writer on a press tour for her newest pandemic tale while she is far from her home (which happens to be on the other side of the moon), and a hotel detective in Night City as he is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness. Through great leaps of insight and care, Mandel is able to not only hold all the strings of her narratives together, but she turns it into a flourishing tale of the human condition; gorgeous and haunting take on the boundless possibilities of our humanity.