TW - pandemic/covid-19

*Though this is marketed as a standalone, I would highly recommend that you read The Glass Hotel prior.*

Wow. Excuse me while I go buy every book Emily has written. I really enjoyed Station Eleven when I read it last year, and was pleased to be approved to read Sea of Tranquility. By chance I saw a review that mentioned you should read The Glass Hotel first, so I dutifully ordered and devoured it, and I'd definitely recommend reading it prior.

The Sea of Tranquility is a book about Gaspery, a man who through luck (?) becomes an investigator of anomalies in time - though this doesn't quite describe what the book is about. Maybe it's about a violinist, the moon, or an author, or a pandemic...it's about them all and I can see me thinking about it for a long time.

[Also - Jonathan - wtf?!]

Quite simply, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is just brilliant. It sets up the plot intrigue, layers in the evocative human angle, references the pandemic situation we find ourselves in and sets it all against a grand time-travelling backdrop that takes us from from 1912 to 2401.

That might sound like a lot to pack into less than 300 pages but the words just flow so lyrically and the story execution is tight. It’s such a delight to read. A wonderful, thoughtful, huge-scoping adventure.

If you’ve read Emily St. John Mandel’s previous books, Station Eleven or The Glass Hotel among them, then you’ll have a grasp of both the themes she explores and a backstory for the plot of Sea of Tranquility. I think you can enjoy this book without having read her previous ones, but knowing their stories definitely adds to the experience here.

Characters we met previously in The Glass Hotel, Vincent and Paul, appear, along with some new ones including Edwin, the second son of a British aristocratic family who, in 1912, ends up in Canada to try and find his purpose in life. What he finds is something far more inexplicable.

Author Olive Llewelyn lives in 2203 and is the Ariadne Oliver of this book, if you will. Olive is on a book tour as her novel, Marienbad, set during a pandemic was a huge hit. She travels from her home in a on Moon Colony Two to Earth for her tour.

In 2401 we meet Gaspery Roberts and his sister Zoey, who work at the Time Institute. They may or may not be looking into time travel, especially at something from another time that’s caught their eye…

I don’t want to give any spoilers in this review, so won’t delve anymore into the plot except to say you may think this sounds a bit complex or convoluted but fear not, it all makes perfect sense. I’m not always a huge fan of time-travel themed books, but this hooked me in.

Sea of Tranquility is the best book I’ve read on this pandemic. For all its scope and time travel themes, it’s also so personal and has such a satisfying ending, it’s this combination that made such an impact. Superb storytelling.

What starts as a seemingly typical story of a futuristic world soon becomes a tight story of time travel, pandemics and reflections on history.

The story largely concerns itself with pre- and post-pandemic worlds, which could feel claustrophobic given the current situation, but instead the story at its heart is more of a fascinating time travel story with a surprising amount of heart.

It is amazing that, for such a short book, this book also feels almost maximalist- so many plot points, themes and ideas whizz around in this book, and yet it still feels light it reads quickly- I devoured this after intending to just read about 50 pages, and read it all over a long commute,

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Spanning multiple centuries, environments and character perspectives, this novel has a vast imaginative breadth to it, comprising moon colonies (from which the title derives), time travel, and pandemics. There are multiple threads but the main of these are Edwin in 1912, a second or third son who is aimlessly in Canada in a sort of exile; Olive Llewellyn, an author in 2203, who grew up in moon Colony Two and wrote a novel about pandemics; and Gaspery Roberts, a bored security man in the even more far flung 2401, when the glamour has worn off the colonies. Gaspery is named after a character in Olive’s famous book and we learn that he is as aimless as Edwin and yearns for something more interesting to fulfil him. Eventually they become connected by the circumstances which touch all of their realities.

It felt very inception-like with ideas about why we are interested in post-apocalyptic fiction, books within books, and I assume sometime soon, book tours within book tours. The character of Olive believes that we are interested in post-apocalyptic fiction because of our increasingly technology-infused lives and a desire to go back to a simpler time with less technology. This is also I feel somewhat related to the main time travel plot point. I also felt that part of the novel really brings home the loss that pandemics bring with them, in a human way.

This novel won’t be for everyone, yet I personally intensely loved it, and I read it so quickly, as can sometimes happen when properly absorbed in something.

My thanks to #NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

In the same way Station Eleven is ostensibly a post-apocalyptic novel, Sea of Tranquility is a novel about time travel – but these descriptors barely scratch the surface. Both novels are about so much more. Written with Mandel’s characteristic deftness of style, Sea of Tranquility is a beguiling examination of humanity, relationships, belonging, loss, technology, with a hefty dose of existential philosophy.

The novel begins in 1912 where Edwin St John St Andrew, a second son of wealthy landowners is banished to re-settle in Canada. One day on rural Vancouver Island he witnesses a strange paranormal disturbance. This disturbance seems to resonate down the ages as the novel then jumps to present day New York where a composer is performing on stage and shows a video clip in which the composer’s sister (Vincent from Mandel’s previous book The Glass Hotel) seems to capture the same disturbance on camera. Jumping forward again to the 23rd century, humans have colonised the moon and further afield, spaceships have replaced planes and holograms have replaced zoom. The novel follows a writer of a popular dystopian science fiction book Olive Llewellyn who was raised on one of these lunar colonies as she embarks on a promotional book tour on Earth. Unbeknownst to her another pandemic is just about to decimate humanity. Jumping forwards again around 200 years, Gaspery Roberts is struggling to find fulfilment in his life and career. Raised on one of the crumbling lunar colonies where the technology is failing, but is too expensive to replace, he starts working in a hotel in one of the more upmarket colonies. However, when his sister Zoey, who works for the vaguely sinister Institute of Time, begins to investigate the disturbance witnessed by Vincent and Edwin St. Andrew, Gaspery is desperate to help. This leads him down a path which he could never have begun to comprehend.

Mandel’s omniscient narrator builds worlds in which you are fully immersed, yet it feels like you barely glimpse. The prose is beautiful and tantalising. I was riveted and in awe of the seamless way it combines intertextuality, constantly circles like Penrose stairs and pulls all the different narrative threads together. Mandel is too smart to answer all the questions she raises but instead leaves the reader pondering some weighty subjects. Somehow, Mandel has written another pandemic novel which encapsulates the essence and fears of the past couple of years, but has made it about so much more than this brief moment on earth. This book will stay with me for a long time.

Absolutely stunning – on par with her previous books, this is transcendent and triumphant. The writing is evocative and stylish, the settings and characters masterfully drawn. Just beautiful.

Emily St. John Mandel is probably one of my favourite authors when it comes to prose and writing stories as a craft. She's a master, and "Sea of Tranquility" once again drew me in right away with the beautiful, captivating, almost lyrical at times writing. I quite enjoyed the two previous novels of her that I had the pleasure of reading, "Station Eleven" and "The Glass Hotel" - the latter of which lends itself as interesting backdrop for her new book. I do admit that it was mostly the aforementioned prose that made me want to read all of her work, not the actual content of the books. The same can be said for "Sea of Tranquility".

It's gorgeously written, well-paced and tells, once again, a more quiet, subtle story with slow build-up that doesn't spell absolutely every little detail out for the reader. I love the style, and I wanted to know more. And once again, pandemics are an important plot point. Structurally as well as thematically I was reminded a little of Cloud Atlas and the more recent Cloud Cuckoo Land. The story is told in different time periods, with at first seemingly unconnected characters and in different places, that are later revealed to be linked. With each chapter, this link unravels more and more, until you finally understand it all at the very ending. It's beautifully done.

Now, I didn't really feel any connection to the characters, which is probably my major gripe about any of the books by this author. They are always written with some sort of detachment, never allowing the reader to get too close, to get really invested in them and their fates. I'm also not sure if the connections to "The Glass Hotel" by revisiting characters from that novel were necessary. I personally think their part of the story would have benefitted from having new characters, because quite a big chunk of these chapters were used to simply retell the events of the previous novel, which was the only part of the book that I was actually bored by.
Another very subjective thing I rarely like in books is the switching between first person and third person narratives - in this particular book, there's such a switch even in chapters with the very same narrator, and while I could guess at the reasons for this choice, I simply won't and say that I found it a little jarring. Different narrators? Yes this could work. The same narrator switching between first and thirn person? Just not my thing, I find it more of a distraction.

All in all, this is a wonderfully written and stunningly crafted novel with big themes that, at least for me, managed to follow me even after I'd finished the book. The characters aren't fleshed out, and I didn't enjoy the recurring characters from "The Glass Hotel", and there are some stylistic choices that I'm not a fan of - but it's definitely a book worth diving into and putting on your tbr pile.
3,5 stars, rounding up.

4.5 stars
It's a lyrical story of time, plague, humanity and meaning across centuries.

It's hard to describe this novel. We meet Edwin St Andrew after he crosses the Atlantic to start a new life in America in 1912, then we encounter Mallory, who is looking for her estranged friend, Vincent decades later, while another century in the future Olive LLewellyn is on a book tour as a pandemic breaks out. And then there is Gaspery Roberts who gets involved in investigating an anomaly for an infamous Time Institute and in the course of his inquiry he meets people whose lives he'll try to change.

I enjoyed this story, it was beautifully written, surprising and reflective. I liked how the lives of all the characters were connected and I appreciated Gaspery's story, twisted as it was. I recommend everyone to read this novel and see for themselves.

A book that takes the reader through time - past, present and future over a span of 5 centuries. An intriguing premise and one in which the same characters appear again and again in different worlds and times. This could be confusing were it not for the fact that the writing is so good, the characters so believable and the settings so extraordinary, but real at the same time. There is a pandemic theme here, but the reader is not bludgeoned by it as in some other recent literature - the pandemic is simply part of a cracking good story that encompasses time travel, life in colonies on the moon, the written word and love, loss and humanity - that’s quite a list but
Emily St John Mandel manages to control it with clarity and an excellent literary writing style. SF is a new genre for this reviewer, but if this book is representative, I’ll be looking for more.

Once again, I’m left speechless after an Emily St John Mandel book. But I’ll try to review. Station Eleven was the first book that took my breath away and started a love affair with dystopian fiction, especially post-apocalyptic or pandemic related. I know that’s not everyone’s thing these days so just a warning that there is some pandemic discussion in Sea. Mandel is a genius at crafting a story that’s both mind-boggling, yet relevant to today. Sea is thought-provoking, a bit eerie, but ultimately reassuring. The following passage about why post-apocalyptic literature is so popular (within this narrative) left me stunned:

“as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story…that now, is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Haven’t we all thought, in the past few years, that this is the worst it’s ever been? Trump, pandemic, now war... But we’re not the climax of the story. Just utterly brilliant. I can’t say enough good things about this book. Highly recommended!!

I absolutely loved Station Eleven (one of my favourite books of the past ten years) and I also loved The Glass Hotel, so sadly I found this a real disappointment, even though it is still worth reading. Sea of Tranquility is loosely linked to both these previous novels, but especially to The Glass Hotel; it's set in the same parallel universe and features a number of the same characters. It features four major plot threads/timelines. Edwin travels aimlessly in Canada in 1912, trying to find a purpose for his life after being 'exiled' from England by his wealthy family. In 2020, Mirelle, a side character from The Glass Hotel, watches a strange forest video made by its protagonist Vincent in 1994. Novelist Olive is on a book tour in 2203 promoting her pandemic novel, Marienbad. Finally, Gaspery discovers the strange truth about his physicist sister's job in 2401.

Sea of Tranquility is a short, quick read, but I don't think I ever got what it was trying to do. As other reviewers have pointed out, the SF elements of this novel feel cliched and stale to anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with the genre. Personally, I hate when writers postulate that time travellers can change the past and have to correct anomalies, because it's by far the stupidest, most illogical and least interesting way to use time travel, especially when there are two perfectly good alternative models available (one, you time travel into a parallel universe; two, you accept you can't change the past and whatever you did there has already happened). However, I also have no interest in the 'we are all living in a simulation' thought experiment, another trope that's very familiar.

Parts of this book feel more like Easter eggs for fans of Mandel's earlier work rather than narrative strands in their own right. The Mirelle section, in particular, would surely feel pointless to anyone who hadn't read The Glass Hotel. Meanwhile, Mandel uses Olive as a mouthpiece to talk about her experiences writing Station Eleven, but again that would only really land if you'd read the earlier novel. Olive's reflections on day to day living in a pandemic are mostly thinly-veiled comments on Covid-19 with added futuristic trappings ('Dion's job required a great many meetings, so he was in the holospace six hours a day and was dazed with exhaustion in the evenings'), which is very irritating.

Nevertheless, there are points in Sea of Tranquility where Mandel really hits it out of the park, and reminds me why I loved her writing in the first place. Some of her pandemic comments are incredibly insightful, much the best writing I've seen on the topic so far: 'Pandemics don't approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It's disorientating. The pandemic is far away and then it's all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step'. And this novel is still perfectly readable and even enjoyable. It's just a bit closer to trashy SF/bad literary takes on SF than the truly literary SF that Mandel is clearly capable of writing. 3.5 stars.

Emily St John Mandel does it again. I *love* her writing, so much! This book starts off slow, but don't be deterred. I read the first 40% over two sittings, and once I hit the halfway point I devoured it all at once. Sci-fi written almost under a literary fiction lens is something I'm so here for. I need more St John Mandel sci-fi asap pls pls pls. I gave this 4.5 stars, purely just for the slow start. The ending blew me away and I would give more than five stars if I could. Loved. Pick this up if you can!

This new novel from the writer of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel opens in 1912, with 18-year-old Edwin St. Andrew on a journey across the Atlantic. The third (and therefore surplus) son of an earl, his travels have been forced upon him after embarrassing his family.

He slowly makes stumbling headway across the continent, hampered by inertia and lack of experience; falling in and out of company with similarly privileged, adrift gentlemen – and he seems destined for a life along these lines. That is until he travels to Vancouver Island, and the tiny rural town of Caiette. There, he stumbles into the forest, bumps into a curious priest, and experiences a reality-shattering moment which he can only describe as supernatural.

The book jumps forward to 2020, and then quickly onwards to 2203, where an author (who lives on the Moon) is beginning a book tour in New York for a novel about a pandemic – to say much more would give the game away!

Yes, one aspect of the novel is about pandemics, but the outbreaks are reflected upon from a distance. It’s mainly a novel about love, connection and family ties – packed with glorious detail that creates believable existences hundreds of years in the future, on different planets to our own. The author’s ability to build worlds should be no surprise to anyone familiar with her previous works: her futures are perfectly imaginable, precisely because of the humanity contained within them, and the messy, meaningful relationships work in 1912 or 2203. Her masterfully plotted and interwoven stories lock into place with a thud, tying up loose ends you didn’t even realise had come undone. A superb read from one of the best writers working today.

Sea of Tranquility is a tale of retrospects, of foresights, of the same moment layered on top of itself like repeated musical notes and of quotes that echo across time. Unlike Station Eleven, this book could not have been written before our particular pandemic. But while Sea of Tranquility both reflects our current crisis and revisits moments and characters from Mandel's preceding two books, it also demonstrates a creative leap for the author: It's the most explicitly science-fictional of her works, exploring time travel by way of a lunar colony in 2401. Despite this conceit wearing thin in parts, the prose never stutters.

A virtuoso performance that as 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,

In ‘Sea of Tranquility’, Emily St. John Mandel moves the reader through different time periods between 1912 and 2401. On several occasions during these 500 years, people have experienced a strange anomaly that they find hard to put into words - a flash of darkness, beautiful Violin music and a whooshing sound. A strange man called Gaspery Roberts also seems to turn up unexpectedly. Most of those who have had these experiences discount them and continue with their lives. However, there are some who think it signifies something much more significant than many could understand.

Mandel is an excellent story teller, who cleverly weaves in contemporary issues and philosophical ideas without this being clunky. Her view of the future combines current day experiences with increased transportation and the colonisation of far flung galaxies, which enables the characters in these sections to be relatable (indeed the novelist referred to may represent at least aspects of Mandel’s experience) and for our time to be looked back on as a time in history.

I haven’t read Mandel’s previous novel ‘Station Eleven’ and so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I absolutely love this. It manages to both be chilling and reassuring at the same time. It asked questions, but also answered some. I can see this book being up there with Attwood. I would highly recommend it and i am keen to read it again.

Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel (@picadorbooks) (@EmilyMandel) Pandemics, time travel, and gorgeous writing
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.

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.
https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Tranquility-Emily-John-Mandel-ebook/dp/B099DRHTLX/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Tranquility-Emily-John-Mandel/dp/0593556593/
https://www.amazon.es/Sea-Tranquility-Emily-John-Mandel-ebook/dp/B099DRHTLX/

About the author:
EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL is the author of six novels, including Sea of Tranquility, The Glass Hotel, and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her work has been translated into thirty-two languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
https://www.amazon.com/Emily-St-John-Mandel/e/B002BMMGK2/

My review:
I thank Pan Macmillan/Picador and NetGalley for providing me an ARC copy of this novel, which I freely chose to review.
I discovered Emily St. John Mandel eight years ago thanks to Station Eleven, which I loved, and I was also very impressed by The Glass Hotel, so I had great expectations for this one, and I wasn’t disappointed. Although it is not necessary to have read the other two novels mentioned to enjoy this one, there are characters and points of commonality between the three, and the way the story is structured (or rather fragmented and then put together, creating interesting and beautiful shapes) is also similar, with jumps back and forth in time (several centuries here), and, in this case, centred on a popular subgenre of science-fiction, time travel.
I don’t read science-fiction often, although I have read some novels in the genre that I’ve enjoyed. This novel is not hard science-fiction. There isn’t a lot of attention paid to how things work and the complex science behind it (the main character knows nothing about it and freely admits to it), nor long explanations and descriptions of the future settings we visit. There are several colonies on the Moon, and also further away, but although we get a feeling of how living there might be (because the characters experiencing it have always lived there, and we perceive things through their eyes. If anything, they are more intrigued by life on Earth than the other way round), there isn’t a deep analysis of every aspect of life in the future, and the mention of metaphysics in the description fits the when trying to describe this novel. It does ask some big questions, about what is important in life, about reality and simulation, about people sometimes living many lives and reinventing themselves, and about circumstances that can make us reconsider our reality, our priorities, and our sense of self.
Because I feel that the way the story is told and the plot are intrinsically linked, and it is difficult to talk about one without unravelling the other, I won’t even try. The blurb provides enough clues for readers to decide if they might want to investigate further. We get snippets of the lives of several characters, who have led completely different lives separated by centuries but are somehow linked. We have men, women, younger and older characters: a female writer famous for writing a dystopian novel set during a pandemic (sharing many similarities with St. John Mandel, in a fascinating exercise in metafiction); a young man exiled by his well-off family to Canada who goes on to fight in WWI; an old violinist who plays at an airport after losing his wife; a woman trying to find a friend whom she thought had betrayed her and discovering something truly disturbing; a listless man trying to find a job that will grip him and help him give meaning to his life... We get to see things from all those characters’ perspectives, narrated in the third person, sometimes in the present tense, but mostly in the past tense, but perhaps because of the fragmented nature of the narrative, and also because of the peculiarities of the characters (who seemed to all be preoccupied with analysing and observing what was happening around them, rather than fully experiencing and living their lives, at least at the beginning), I felt as if I was peering over their shoulders and being a spectator, although with privileged access to their thoughts as well. It wasn’t a problem for me, and as the novel progressed and the whole picture became clearer, I came to change the way I felt about some of the characters and to understand and appreciate them more. Being an avid reader, I really enjoyed the character of Olive Llewellyn, an author from the Moon on a book tour on Earth. The fact that her book has a lot in common with Station Eleven, and also the way her visit coincides with a pandemic on Earth, makes her feel particularly close to us and to our recent experiences, but, as I said, the rest of the characters grew on me, particularly Gaspery, who gains in complexity and interest, and I’m sure I won’t forget him in a hurry.
The author writes beautifully, combining brief and magical descriptions of locations, capturing awe-inducing moments in poetic language, and expressing complex ideas in simple but effective ways. This is a book where plot, characters, structure, and language live in perfect harmony, and despite the jumps in time and the moments of action, the overall tone is contemplative and reflexive. There are moments of telling, due to the nature of the story, but this does not detract from the atmosphere or the flow of the novel, and it does feel like a pretty short read that manages to pack quite a lot of meaning and thought into few pages. Despite the changes in time lineand point of view, the narration is always clearly signposted, and there is no risk of getting lost within its many worlds.
A few samples from the book (although there might have been changes prior to publication):

What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water.

Olive here, thinking about the death of one of her characters in her novel, which one of the readers had described as “anticlimactic”:
... isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

The thing with being away from her husband and daughter was that every hotel room was emptier than the one before.

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.

This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.

I enjoyed the ending, and I can’t imagine a more satisfying one. There are twists and plenty of mysteries in the story, but things come together in the end. I am not sure if readers will find the ending surprising or not (it might depend on how much they read about time travel and how closely they follow the clues), but I enjoyed the sense of closure (for all the characters), and also the overall feeling of quiet, calm, and hope that its end brings. We might agree or disagree with the main character’s decisions, but I liked his attitude towards life and towards his fellow human beings.
Do I recommend this book? Definitely. I am sure fans of the author will enjoy it. Readers looking for a hard science-fiction novel or keen on a time travel narrative full of big adventures and thrilling moments might want to look elsewhere. But those who enjoy beautiful writing, don’t mind getting lost in speculation and allowing their minds to wander through a world of possibilities, should try this book. And if they haven’t read Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel and enjoy this one, they shouldn’t hesitate and just keep reading St. John Mantel.

“It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”

Rating: 5/5 stars

I have mentioned before this “problem” I have as a reviewer, where I struggle to review the books I love the most. The books I can’t keep out of my mind, that make my heart overflow; they are also the books where words fail me in discussing them. I can already tell that Sea of Tranquillity is going to fall victim to that as well, so strap in for a longform loveletter.
TLDR: do yourself a favour and pre-order this book today!

What is Sea of Tranquillity?
To paraphrase the publisher: it’s a character-driven story of time travel, that precisely captures the reality of our current moment. To use my own words: it’s a return to everything I loved in the authors previous two novels, both of which I consider all-time-favourites. All three are stories that follow a cast of characters, surviving (and living, because “survival is insufficient”) their own brand of “apocalypses”. All three share themes, a feeling of melancholy and hope, and now characters, as Sea of Tranquillity brings back familiar names from her previous works.
Reaching across time from 1912th Canada to a Moon Colony in 2401, this novel has the scope of a sci-fi epic, but the intimacy of a midnight kiss.

Characters for the ages
As mentioned: Sea of Tranquillity introduces a new set of wonderful characters to us, but also brings back some familiar names from Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. It’s a bold choice that works out great in this story. You don’t have to read the previous two works in order to enjoy Sea of Tranquillity, but I personally do recommend it. I had recently reread both The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven and having these stories so clear in my mind added a deeper layer to my current reading experience that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss.
Yet even if you come into this story brand new, you will still benefit from Mandel’s familiarity with these characters and this world. The fact that she knows them through and through makes it possible to craft some of the most memorable and fleshed-out characters I’ve read about in a long time, within less than 300 pages.
Part of that familiarity may also come from a place of personal experience. Through the character of Olive Llewellyn - an author who published a pandemic novel, right at the dawn of a real-life pandemic – Mandel reflects on her own pandemic-experiences. Whilst I usually don’t enjoy these clear “autobiographical nods” from the author, in this case it was subtle, relatable and seamlessly integrated.

Structurally brilliant
In a recent interview Mandel mentions David Mitchells Cloud Atlas as an important piece of inspiration for Sea of Tranquillity. Although I love Mitchells work, I feel like Mandel did more than just take influences from this style; she managed to improve and master it completely. The story and characters loop back on themselves, and even their predecessors with an effortless grace that I think only Mandel could’ve pulled off. Where Cloud Atlas was a pioneer of the style, with all of the clunks and kinks that go along, Sea of Tranquillity is a well-oiled machine. Every phrase, every motif and every timeline interlocks and spins together like the gears in a clock; meticulously crafted but seeming effortless. It’s the display of wonderful craftmanship, without sacrificing readability that makes Mandel a favourite for me. As much as I loved her work before: she keeps getting stronger and stronger with every subsequent release.

Worthy of its title
On a more personal note: this “universe” (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and now Sea of Tranquillity) has a very special place in my heart. Each book has a distinct feeling to it, and each of them slotted somehow perfectly into the rhythm of my life at that moment. It may not be the books virtue perse, but it’s a powerful reading experience regardless. When it comes to “the feeling”, Sea of Tranquillity honours its title: it feels like the serene calm to follow a storm. It feels like… well: I’ll let Mandel do the talking one final time:

“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.”

Many thanks to Picador Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review: it was an honour to read this early.

4.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Emily St. John Mandel’s writing is always like a quiet gut punch. Sea of Tranquillity packs a lot in its relatively short length. You come in and out of characters' lives but still manage to feel like you know and connect with these characters. It was a tough read at times due to its pandemic commentary (a couple of lines totally rocked me on how spot-on they felt) but a beautiful read too. Well-paced and structured, the book doesn’t overstay its welcome and leaves you wanting more.

While this doesn’t quite rise to the heights of Station Eleven (and there is clearly commentary on her post-Station Eleven experience within the book) it is still interesting, evocative, and emotional.

Whether or not you enjoy Sea of Tranquility is likely to be dependent on the extent you enjoyed The Glass Hotel. In many ways, Sea of Tranquility is a return to the dystopian style of Station Eleven, but it also is a partial expansion of the world created in the Glass Hotel. I was genuinely impressed with Mandel's world building, and the way she weaved seemingly random events from The Glass Hotel into the mystery of the Sea of Tranquility. I also really enjoyed the subtle dystopian shift of each distinct time period.

I was less keen on the way, it seemed to me, that Mandel overtly referenced her own experiences as a writer, and centered herself as a character in the novel. It's a personal taste, but I just don't generally think having writers as central characters makes for a particularly good story. I also wanted the mystery and resolution to be a bit more conclusive, and i felt the mystery was ultimately overshadowed by the decision to centre the writer as a main character.

Cloud-Atlas-esque novels seem to be all the rage in 2022…

“This place is precarious, that’s the only word for it. It’s the lightest sketch of civilizations, caught between the forest and the sea. He doesn’t belong here”


This is my third novel by Mandel and once again I have rather conflicting thoughts and feelings about her work. On the one hand, I recognize how talented a writer she is. Her prose has this cool yet delicate quality to it that brought to mind authors such as y, z, and even . I always found myself appreciating her subtle storytelling and her ability to make her characters retain a certain unknowability. I also find her use of imagery to be highly effective in that these motifs add a certain nostalgic atmosphere to her settings. So much so that I often read of her characters and or the landscapes which she writes of with a strong sense of Deja Vu. Maybe because Mandel often returns to the same issues or even goes so far as to refer to the same characters in seemingly unconnected/stand-alone books (a la mandel-multiverse). Here this sense of familiarity with her characters and their struggles is very fitting indeed given the story’s ‘crucial’ theme.

“[T]hese moments that had arisen one after another after another, worlds fading out so gradually that their loss was apparent only in retrospect.”


The book opens in 1912. Edwin St. Andrew is but a young English lad who after angering his father for the last time has been banished to the ‘new world’. His attempts at making a go of things in Canada don’t quite go as smoothly as he’d hoped. There are some stunning descriptions of the landscapes here and there was something about Edwin that appealed to me. There was almost an otherworldly feel to this section, partly due to the remoteness and vastness of Edwin’s new ‘home’ (i am not at all familiar with that type of environment hence my finding it surreal). This section comes to a close with Edwin witnessing something quite Other.
We then are reunited with a side character from The Glass Hotel. It’s corona-time and Mirella (Vincent’s ‘friend’) has yet to fully recover from the death of her partner and the whole Ponzi fallout. She has a girlfriend but we learn virtually nothing about her or their relationship as this section is more of an ode to Vincent. FYI, I hated Vincent in The Glass Hotel. She was the reason why I didn’t really love that book, and, understandably then, I was not particularly enthusiastic when I realized that she would play a role here as well. Even if she is not on the ‘page’, her presence saturates much of Mirella’s narrative, to the point where it struck me as a bit unfair to Mirella herself. She’s an interesting character in her own right and yet we don’t really get to focus on her. Paul, Vincent’s brother, makes an appearance but his character here didn’t strike me as particularly nuanced. It turns out that Vincent too is connected to the bizarre phenomenon witnessed by Edwin and once again the narrative makes much of her ‘art’ (*cough*banal-as-it-is). That the narrative includes Mirella unfavourably comparing her gf to Vincent was kind of a joke. It really cemented why I did not like Vincent, to begin with. I am sick of Not Like Other People type of characters.
The following section is set in the 2200s. Here we learn that some people now live on colonies on the moon, one of them is this famous author named Olive Llewellyn. She’s now on a book tour on Earth where she discusses her hit book which is, surprise surprise, about a pandemic. During her tour however Olive becomes preoccupied with the news about an actual pandemic…Olive struck me as a self-insert. There were so many lines that just came across as if they were coming from Mandel herself. Particularly the questions about what it feels like to have written a pandemic novel when there is an actual pandemic etc…I find this sort of stuff cringe and there was something slightly self-congratulatory and ‘special about Olive that just made it really hard for me to even believe in her (she was a bit of Vincent 2.0). Additionally, this section is set in the 2200s and I did not buy into it. Moon colonies aside the future envisioned here was not particularly thought out. Many inconsistencies have to do with the tech available (people still have devices?) and the way the characters spoke was just too contemporary, almost old-fashioned even (i could all too easily imagine someone saying 'old chap'). This worked for the sections before but here it was just prevented me from fully immersing myself in the events being narrated. The discussions about pandemics, epidemics, and writing about these things, were rather contrived, which again, pulled me out of the story. It turns out that Olive also is connected to the bizarre phenomenon witnessed by Edwin and Vincent.

The final section is set in the 2400s and once again the world described here did not feel particularly ‘futuristic’. While the author does include one or two details that remind us that the people from this century write and speak differently to say now, these were not enough to establish a believable setting. Anyhow, here we follow Gaspery-Jacques Roberts who is a fairly bland character. The most interesting about him is of course his name. His sister is yet another Not Like Other People type of character (there is something about Mandel’s female characters that really annoys me…). She works for this ‘mysterious’ institution and eventually, Gaspery finds himself joining her ranks. He is assigned a mission: to find out more about the anomaly connecting Edwin, Vincent, and Olive. I was hoping that we would return to the previous perspectives, such as Edwin and Mirella, but the narrative from this point onward favours Gaspery. There was a very funny lil scene about his cat, but for the most part, his story struck me as vaguely predictable. The man was bland and the moral dilemma he faces was handled in a rather simplistic and hurried way.

It would have been nice for the timelines set in the 2200s and the 2400s to be less heteronormative and gender-normative. We get a queer side character but that’s kind of it (if memory serves). There were some interesting themes at play in the book such as human connection and loneliness, empathy and choice. I appreciated the motifs that were interspersed throughout these interconnected narratives, as they consolidated the connection between these seemingly unconnected people. The conversations around pandemics were rather been-there-done-that kind of thing. I actually believe that they would have suited to an article more than this type of piece of fiction. I did find the execution to be ultimately disappointing. While the truth behind this anomaly wasn’t ‘shocking’ I did like the way it was played out. I do wish however that we could have spent more time with the characters we were introduced to early on in the book (rather than sticking to mr. boring and the cringy self-insert).
As you can probably tell by my somewhat incoherent review I feel rather conflicted about this book. Mandel’s prose is *chief’s kiss*. Her characters and her story however were a bit of a flop. I would have liked for the 'anomaly' to retain a certain mystery rather than it being explained away. I think I preferred the subtle magical realism of The Glass Hotel than the more sci-fi elements that were at play here, which were 1) not really convincing and 2) a bit sci-fi 101.

I would definitely recommend it to Mandel fans (my mother among them). If you are, like me, not entirely 'sold' on her work well, it seems unlikely that this will be the one to win you over (then again, i might be wrong here).