Another tour de force of imagination and dazzling construction from the author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, Mandel's audacious time travel novel intertwines the stories of an Edwardian exile in British Columbia and an Earth-hopping writer two centuries later.
The award-winning author of Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel returns with a novel of time travel that precisely captures the reality of our current moment. Sea of Tranquility is a virtuoso performance and an enormously exciting offering from one of our most remarkable writers.
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 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.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781529083491
Number of pages: 272
Weight: 380 g
Dimensions: 223 x 273 x 29 mm
Brilliant . . . a fiercely original creation - Observer
It is heaven to be immersed in the waters of Mandel's imagination . . . so wise, so graceful, so rich . . . I loved Sea of Tranquility - Naomi Alderman, Women's Prize-winning author of The Power
A spiralling, transportive triumph of storytelling - sci-fi with soul - Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies
A cunning time-travel narrative . . . unputdownable . . . distinctive, remarkable work from one of the genre’s major voices - Guardian, Best Books of the Year
One of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into speculative fiction yet - New York Times
A time travel epic: a soaring story of connections through the ages . . . profound and life-affirming - Vogue
Even more boldly imagined than Station Eleven. Exciting to read, relevant, and satisfying. - Kirkus
Ingenious, hugely ambitious . . . graceful and beguiling - Guardian
Bold and exciting . . . Sea of Tranquility is Mandel’s most ambitious novel yet. Inventing and mind-bending - The Economist
Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling . . . a speculative epic - New Yorker
Extraordinary . . . An expertly crafted time-travel tale . . . supremely satisfying and moving . . . You won’t be able to shut up about this book - Irish Times
Readers of Mandel’s Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel will not be disappointed, a generous and elegant novel about art and family and time travel - LitHub
Mind-blowing - Washington Post
Mandel remains an instant-buy writer - Glamour
Wonderfully inventive . . . genuinely impressive, subtle and nuanced . . . a story with love and longing for connection at its heart, moving and thought-provoking in equal measure - Big Issue
An ambitious time-travelling panorama of pandemics and parallel worlds - Guardian
A story like a tone poem, uncannily lovely and profound - EW
A trippy, wistful story - Wired
An inventive, haunting, and tender time-travel story that underscores the importance and resilience of art - Vulture
Poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing - NPR
Sensational . . . masterfully plotted and deeply moving - Esquire
Emily St. John Mandel, who, like an ingenious origami artist, seems determined with each new work to add yet another fold to our perception of what is real and one further twist to what we think of as time . . . Transcendent - Wall Street Journal
Mandel illustrates how hope and humanity are flames that can never be fully extinguished - Elle
World builder is a phrase that's rightly used to describe Emily Mandel's immersive powers as a novelist. I didn't just read Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel or Sea of Tranquility. I lived in those novels - Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 fourth novel – the post apocalyptical “Station Eleven” (dealing with the aftermath of a deadly swine flu pandemic and beginning with an actor dying from a heart attack in a production of... More
I can't adequately explain just how much I loved this novel.
This is as beautifully written as it is addictive - as soon as I picked this up I didn't want to do anything but read this, and I was devastated...
More
This is the third of a series of novels which very strongly complement one another. The first of course is the award-winning “Station Eleven”, with its themes of global pandemic and survival. The second is “The... More
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?
