There’s a lot of meta in this book. One of the story strands is about an author who’s written a very successful novel about a pandemic and is now experiencing one for real, and another riffs on the plot of Mandel’s previous novel. I love that sort of thing, so I was already inclined to like the book, even if it hadn’t been such a touching affirmation of humanity and our shared connections. It is a pandemic novel in every sense, in story and I suspect in origin, and the message throughout is that we get through difficult times together. Objectively speaking, the final twist isn’t much of a surprise if you’ve read as much SF as I have, but subjectively and in the moment it knocked me out, so caught up was I in this beautiful and emotionally resonant novel.

If I'd realised there were MULTIPLE pandemics in this one, I might not have choose to read it right now! ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫/5

What could possibly link eighteen-year-old aristocrat-in-exile Edwin Andrew, author 23rd century author and moon-dweller Olive Llewellyn, and Gaspery Jacques-Roberts, one-time hotel security now employed by the shadowy agency to investigate time anomalies? One answer is pandemics, each life shadowed by run-away disease. But the reality is much more complex and the repercussions of small choices can change everything.

Emily St John Mandel does it again, weaving storylines through time, nesting narratives and peppering her story with shining interstices between characters and events. The way it all comes together is masterful, leading the reader to pick up clues they didn't even realise were there. Olive offers a meta experience touring her pandemic novel as rumours of a new virus emerge. It's tempting to see St John Mandel's own experience as a writer of pandemic fiction. It's also a beautiful metaphysical discourse on time and reality and living a meaningful

I thoroughly enjoed this title, Emily St. John Mandel weaves together so many different stories and timelines that resolve into a compelling, thoughtful look at humanity in times of crisis and stasis. With deft prose and a light touch she captures something unique about living through a pandemic and the importance of shared human kindness and hope.

Another incredible story family Emily St John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility was a dream to read, Mandel's writing kept me captivated from start to finish as we weave through all the different timelines and drop in on all the different characters and watch the story start to weave together. I knew when I had finished reading it that I had read something special. A must read!

Also, if you've read The Glass Hotel by her, you'll see some familiar characters.

This book is a joy. A love letter to her previous novels, Mandel thoughtfully explores humanity, loss, and longing using time travel and the nature of reality versus simulation. The coming together of seemingly disparate threads culminates in a dazzling crescendo.

Somewhere between 3 - 3.5

Sea of Tranquility follows Mandel's last novel, The Glass Hotel (published in 2020), which I found the story to be involving and transporting - various themes, characters and setting deftly weaved together to form a memorable and compelling narrative.

So it almost goes without saying that the follow-up, Sea of Tranquility, was one of my most anticipated novels of 2022. The word "interesting" is an almost lazy descriptor, but even when I don't love Mandel's novels I always find them to be interesting; by which I guess I mean putting together slightly unexpected plot lines and settings and creating something engaging.

All this to say that while I largely enjoyed this novel I left wanting something more. There was quite a lot going on, and I particularly liked the sections following the author on her end of the world book tour. The time travelling sequences didn't work quite as well for this reader, and at times it felt like there was too much going on for a novel of this length. The pandemic setting felt a bit forced, too. As always the writing and pacing was good, so overall a bit of a mixed bag. Not one I regret reading by any means, but I doubt it'll linger long in my mind.

As others have said - if you've never read anything by Emily St. John Mandel before, don't start here. Oh and also: this is a standalone book but I think it reads better read after The Glass Hotel as some characters overlap.

“𝘞𝘦 𝘬𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨”
Time travel, science fiction, metaphysics, a pandemic- this book has it all in 272 pages of some of the most labyrinthine storytelling I’ve ever read.

I won’t divulge too much about the plot as if I start to pick away at the threads of this beautiful book, then the whole story may unravel. And to do that would deny you of the pleasures and surprises of reading 𝘚𝘦𝘢 𝘰𝘧 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺. Suffice to say, the book is spread across several disparate time periods, on earth and on a moon colony. (Don’t let this put you off). It features several protagonists, such as Edwin St Andrew in 1912 Canada, the author Olive Llewelyn (possibly Emily St John Mandel herself) on an exhausting book tour of Earth in the 23rd century to Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective investigating a bizarre anomaly in the 25th century.

There’s so much to discuss about this book. There’s the happy “coincidence” of a writer in a pandemic writing a book about a writer in a pandemic. There’s weighty questions as to whether all of reality is in fact a simulation and then there are the wonderful connections to ESJM’s previous two novels, 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘌𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘏𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘭. (My favourite aspect of the novel).

To be able to reconnect with some of the characters from these earlier books was a total joy! While this is a stand-alone novel, it will make your reading experience so much more satisfying if you have read these books. The prose is sublime as always. At one point ESJM describes the ascent from earth into space as akin to “ 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘣𝘶𝘣𝘣𝘭𝘦”.

I adored this book. ESJM has bowled me over (again)with this fantastical yet totally credible story. This is a book to be savoured and read again. Go in with an open mind and enjoy it. 5 ⭐️

With many, many thanks to @netgalley and @panmcmillan for the opportunity to read an ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

Absolutely adored this - exactly the right book for 2022. Would recommend reading Glass House first, so that you can get all the references for this companion novel.

Emily St John Mandel's new novel Sea of Tranquility looks at the little, unexpected links between lives at the largest scale, at cause and effect and coincidence. While we are dealing with a number of different stories, we are also only reading one story.

It revisits some of the characters, events and locations of her last novel, The Glass Hotel but from a different (and explicitly, parallel worlds based) perspective. Edwin St John St Andrew, for example, who we meet in 1912 and whose story forms the first of the separate timelines here, is an Englishman who has travelled to Canada to make something of himself. What, he's not really sure, and he bounces around living comfortably on his remittance ('They've booked first-class passage on a delightful train that features an onboard post office and border shop...') until he lands up in Caiette, the small town that featured in the earlier book, his story meshing across decades with those of Mirella and Vincent from The Glass Hotel.

Meanwhile, if I can use the word, a 22nd century author, Olive Llewelyn, is visiting Earth for a book tour from her home on a lunar colony. During Olive's trip, a new and deadly pandemic breaks out - the description of which (including periods of lockdown, tracking of the day's 'numbers' and that troubling sense of psychic suddenness, of there being a before and now) vividly evoked, for me, the past couple of years. Two centuries on, another figure, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, looks back a couple of centuries to Olive's life and death and to that 22nd century pandemic. Of course, Sea of Tranquility isn't this author's first pandemic story. Her Station Eleven (soon to be released as a TV series) addressed a more serious, acute and apocalyptic plague, and The Glass Hotel was set in a world where that pandemic hadn't happened, with a kind of "thin walls between the worlds" sense of paths not taken placing the two books in the same space of possibilities.

Sea of Tranquility actually picks up more on the latter aspect, and the separate narrative threads here are part of that, although it would give away too much to discuss in detail how all these figures relate to one another. That - especially the way that the events of The Glass Hotel intrude - needs to reveal itself slowly as St John Mandel's story unrolls - but I will say that the separate threads here are very much in dialogue with each other, posing questions that only make sense, and are only answered (when they are answered) from that wider perspective.

The timespan of the story is the most obvious, but not the only, way this is done, giving a view not all the characters have themselves. Edwin will see the horrors of the First World War, a war Gaspery, in the future, has no knowledge of and has to research, just as Gaspery also has to remind himself just when that outbreak of covid-19 struck (he wonders whether colleagues meeting in early 2020 would be aware of or affected by it?) St John. Mandel shows ing how even the most salient of current events eventually get tidied away out of historical awareness (just as many of us in 2022 may have been unaware until recently of the post Great War flu pandemic).

Another example is the sense of messages being passed, under the teacher's nose as it were, between the characters. If you've read The Glass Hotel you may recall Vincent's brother's art project based on her videos. Here, that work assume a new significance when observed from afar, preserving events and perspectives that raise questions centuries later. Or again, we see a phrase from the future scribbled in the wall of a prison cell, something that happened in the earlier book but assuming an ominous new significance here. All of this points to something - a secret, a concern - behind the intersections of the various storylines, yet intimately bound up with them all.

I hope that doesn't make Sea of Tranquility sound too contrived, plot-y or clever-clever. It's really not. Rather, what I found in this book was perfect depictions of complex and conflicted characters, and engaging, almost glowing, writing through every strand of the story. "I couldn't put it down" is a much overused, much abused phrase, but for me, Sea of Tranquility totally merited it. St John Mandel really can write, skewering a character with a single phrase - 'When Edwin's father was furious, he had a trick of beginning speeches with a half-sentence, to catch everyone's attention'; 'The neighbourhood seemed fairly tame to her and it wasn't that late, also she was afraid of nothing...';

There were also moments that made me smile, especially some that, I assume, directly reflect St John Mandel's experience as an author. Olive muses, for example, that 'if you've stayed in one Marriott, haven't you stayed in all of them?' That shows how St John Mandel refuses to SF-up her book. She doesn't point up the 22nd century in general as strange and advanced and different, any more than she makes life on the Moon in particular strange and advanced and different, simply noting the essentials: the US is split into a number of separate republics, the moon colonies are built within domes. Otherwise, there are hotels, book tours, air travel, taxis. A pandemic can rage uncontrolled then, as now. We might assume some of these things are rather different in detail to those we know now, but we don't need to be told exactly how.

As I've suggested above, Olive's experiences often seem to parallel St John Mandel's. Her tour is for her book Marienbad. Before Marienbad she wrote three books that no one noticed and '"I've written two others since then. But Marienbad's being made into a film..."' Marienbad puzzles some: '"There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn't, ultimately. The book just ended. I was like-"'

Olive ponders the comment for the next three days. Did she end her book too abruptly?

It's conceivable that this is directed, at some level, at reaction to The Glass Hotel which, kind of, does "just stop". My own view is that it ends in the right place because what leads up to that "stop" creates a rich and wonderful background so that the ending makes perfect sense. But maybe Sea of Tranquility, with its links to the previous book, might be a response to that, giving us more? If so, then I don't think it was strictly necessary - but I do think the result is glorious. Sea of Tranquility is completely self-contained and doesn't need the reader to know about the earlier book, but, taken together, the two stories are like parts in a musical work, adding so much depth and meaning to each other and sending me back to re-read the earlier story and think through the experiences and perspectives of the characters there.

In short, I'd strongly recommend Sea of Tranquility.

Absolutely brilliant and captivating. Mandel’s books will be the classics of the future.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my feedback.

Wow I sped through this book! This book follows three time lines, has time travel, science, family , touch of romance, mystery and a pandemic. It sounds like chaos but actually it’s written really well. I don’t want to write too much and spoil anything but the last 50 pages blew me away. Absolutely adored it and could be my favourite read of the year

We included this in our article “22 books to look out for in 2022” on Caboodle, the rewards programme from National Book Tokens.

“ You may have reread Station Eleven after it resonated with us in a way we couldn’t have predicted in the past few years, but now Emily St. John Mandel is back with a brand new science fiction novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities.”

A cross between Cloud Atlas, The Psychology of Time Travel and Station Eleven, this book gripped me from the first page and I couldn't put it down. Expertly weaving stories across centuries, Emily St. John Mandel develops a vivid plot and fully-formed characters, creating a novel that, in less deft hands, could have been twice the length.

There were threads in the story that I would love to see a sequel about in the future. Anyone looking to dip their toe into science-fiction needs to pick this up and for those more seasoned in the genre, this felt refreshing and brilliantly built.

I read Sea of Tranquility in a matter of hours as I couldn't put it down.

Emily St. John Mandel writes beautifully, creating characters with depth, feeling and realism. Add in a captivating, imaginative and thought provoking plot and you end up with a fantastic novel like Sea of Tranquility.

The perspectives of all the characters were wonderful, and whilst not all of them were likeable, their motivations and outlooks were presented in an honest and understandable way, meaning that the story was always enjoyable.

Beautifully written, thought provoking and unputdownable - highly recommended. Thanks to Pan Macmillan, Picador and NetGalley for the ARC.

Having enjoyed Mandels previous novels,I was happy to get my hands on this.
Even happier now I've read it,as for me,it's her best yet.
There's a constant wondering of where the threads of the stories join,and the satisfaction when you see they do.
Some fantastic characters (I had a soft spot for Olive Llewelyn especially,who was not just wonderfully named,but talked about pandemics a lot) and a story line that just kept going ... until I'd hit the last page,a little sad that it had finished.

"A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life."

I think I might have a new favourite writer?! Like most people, I read Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and was incredibly taken by it—it actually made me cry. Then I read The Glass Hotel in basically one sitting. And now I read an ARC of Sea of Tranquillity over the course of one day (in California, where I was visiting my 97-year-old grandma).

It’s not often I encounter a writer whose work I CANNOT PUT DOWN. What is it about her work I find so captivating? The large cast of characters, and the feeling of curiosity I have while reading: curiosity about how it’s all going to connect. It makes me feel like a detective, like I have to pay attention, and I love that feeling. I also love her obvious respect for genre fiction (sci-fi and dystopian), and her imagination and ambition. And I love the sense of humanity in her work, how even when sad things happen, there’s still a sense of hope—a fundamental optimistic view of us humans, muddling through.

Sea of Tranquillity tackles time travel, simulations, the multiverse, and living on the moon, among other things. It opens with a chapter that’s basically historical fiction, continues with a chapter involving characters from The Glass Hotel, follows an author on a futuristic book tour on the brink of a pandemic break-out, and it’s only then we meet the man who is arguably the main character: a time travelling detective. The question of how these characters all interconnect is one of the main driving forces for why you want to read the book, and why it brings you pleasure.

Some people might criticise this book for the same reason they criticised Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You—there’s very clear parallels between the ‘author’ character in the novel and the IRL author. The author character in Sea of Tranquillity is famous for writing a book about a pandemic in which millions of people are killed, and then she finds herself facing a situation in which her book tour being cancelled because of a pandemic—very much like St. John Mandel herself. Is there something a bit gauche writing about the millions of copies you’ve sold and successful global book tours you’ve gone on when that’s basically an experience that SO FEW writers have? Maybe. Are some of the passages where the author character discusses why she writes fantastical fiction (I don’t want to write about anything real) or why she thinks post-apocalyptic fiction is popular (We long secretly for a world with less technology in it) read a bit essayistic, like St. John Mandel has inserted her own opinions? Yes. But I think this is a brave, bold move on both Rooney and St. John Mandel’s part: they’re tackling the issue head-on, not avoiding it, and they’re doing it through the lens of fiction, rather than the personal essay. I wonder if they both found it easier to grapple with these topics while wearing the mask of fiction, rather than autofiction (which the novel argues is increasingly being used these days to call anything that’s just plain ‘ordinary’ literary realism). Anyway… go fiction!!

This is a really interesting novel to compare to the other ‘pandemic’ novels I’ve read recently, like Sarah Moss’ The Fall and Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat. Is someone going to write their PhD thesis on these three novels one day? Probably. I think it’s good for established novelists to engage with our current reality—it’ll make for interesting reading, ten years in the future, a sort of document of what we went through. For what it’s worth, Sea of Tranquillity was the most successful pandemic novel I’ve read so far, mainly for how defamiliarizing it was. Yes, it’s set in a future when the main character lives on the moon, but reading the passage when she comes home and takes all her clothes off outside because she’s afraid of infecting her daughter… the disinfecting, the months of lockdown boredom, the brutal work/teach/childcare schedule she and her husband have to set up… lots of people are going to find it very relatable. As one character puts it, This will be our lives now, memorising the surfaces we’ve touched.

Basically, this is another successful knock out of the park. Bravo, Ms. St. John Mandel! Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

I came to this book as a long-term fan of Emily St John Mandel’s novels. I’ve read them all, most of them more than once. Most recently, I re-read Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel back to back, which is something well worth doing, partly for the pleasure of reading them, partly for the thrill of finding characters repeating across the books and partly for the way they echo ideas between one another.

I had no idea whether Sea of Tranquility would continue that theme of connection or would be something very different. It turns out that reading Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel before reading Sea of Tranquility really is a very good idea and I would thoroughly recommend it. Characters from The Glass Hotel feature here and there is a link to Station Eleven. But there’s also the simple fact that they are three outstanding books, so you could just read them because of that.

Sea of Tranquility is set in the same “world” as The Glass Hotel, a world where there hasn’t been a major outbreak of ‘flu in Georgia but there has been a major financial crime committed by Jonathan Alkaitis (who, to further the links between Mandel’s books, is also a key character in The Lola Quartet). This is, of course, the alternate world imagined by a character in Station Eleven where the Georgia pandemic HAS happened.

As the book opens, we are with Edwin St John St Andrew on a boat headed from England to Canada because he has been banished from his homeland by his family. In Canada, he has a strange experience that includes a violin and a strange noise, and he meets a strange man.

One of the things that is most fun about reading this book, as with all of Mandel’s books, is putting the pieces together as you read. She has a real talent for telling you exactly what you need to learn at a given point in a story to make that story more compelling and more intriguing: this happens in all her novels! For that reason, I am avoiding saying anything about the plot that is not already revealed in the book’s blurb. In fact, I feel the book’s blurb goes too far, really, but I say that as someone who didn’t read it prior to reading the book only afterwards.

One of the most delightful things about the book is the creation of the character Olive Llewelyn, an author who wrote “three books that no one noticed” and then shot to fame when her fourth novel was about a pandemic. Stop me when you start to see parallels here. For much of the sections that focus on Olive it feels almost as if you are talking directly with Emily St John Mandel as Olive tours the world talking about her book (which is being made into a film). These sections are full of, in addition to the main storytelling for this novel, observations about being an author or being a woman subject to casual sexism. It’s a close call, but I think I would say these sections were my favourite parts of the novel, maybe mainly because I feel I got to know Ms Mandel a lot better as I read them (unless she is hiding well behind a persona she has created, of course). I also enjoyed these parts of the book for the way they captured the experience of living in a pandemic. And at the heart of Olive’s novel lies a strange event that involves violins and a strange noise.

Between these two stories, and this isn’t actually mentioned in the blurb, we meet some characters from The Glass Hotel and hear about a strange experience involving violins and a strange noise.

Of course, you will have to read the book to find out how these events connect and what happens to all the people who experience them or hear about them. As will all of Mandel’s novels, this is a beautifully crafted story where it feels that everything is revealed at exactly the right moment.

This is overtly a science fiction book. Its structure has clear similarities to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and it is apparent from the character crossovers that Mandel and Mitchell are both playing a similar game with a “multiverse”. This book has a shared DNA with The Glass Hotel especially and with Station Eleven to a lesser degree, but this one shows much more of a sci-fi leaning. It is sci-fi with a heart, though, that seems very conscious of the impact COVID-19 has had on people and empathises with what we have all gone through. It explores what it means to lose things/people and what it means to treasure or value things/people.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I think what elevates it to another level for me is reading in context with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. As a set of three books, these are brilliant. The first two can standalone (although why would you want to do that when they are all so good), but I think this one really needs the others for the full experience.

St. John Mandel is such an impressive writer and she has managed to carry off the 'pandemic' novel due to the intertextuality with her own narrative of writing Station Eleven. It is also impressive how she could write it so soon to 2020 and without needing more time to reflect.

I really enjoy all of her books (although I have not read the invisible first three!). I loved how this book plays into her previous books - I am not sure how I would have felt reading it without that context.

Some of the plot points seemed a bit awry (surely an expert on pandemics would be a bit more wary of an outbreak?) But this novel is astute and re-telling the 2020 pandemic as we experienced it (i.e. it took us all by surprise.)

And there are clever subtleties (i.e. discussion of colonization in the past that would have spread viruses and likewise the fictional future.)

I also love the title (funnily enough I am watching The Silent Sea on Netflix which is based on the moon's Sea of Tranquillity!)

Although I am a bit depressed after reading it and feel that my life is a bit meaningless (i.e. only fragmentary archives available in 400 years time of our time!) I will still give it 5 stars though, for sheer scope and enjoyment.

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 King Lear) was already something of a classic (nominated for various literary prizes in US, UK and Canada and winner of the 2015 Arthur C Clarke Science Fiction award) before enjoying a huge resurgence (for obvious reasons) in 2020 (and getting its own HBO mini series in December 2021).

I came to the book in 2020 when I read it back to back with her fifth novel “The Glass Hotel” – read together (and I think it is by far the best way to read them) the novels were simply brilliantly. “The Glass Hotel” in particular, alongside its exploration of capitalism and white collar crime with its pseudo-Madoff plot, is really an exploration of ideas such as shadow worlds, ghost worlds, lost worlds, counter-factual narratives, doubleness, parallel realities: and what really makes the books work so well together is that “The Glass Hotel” is effectively the parallel universe mentioned in the “Station Eleven” quote where the devastating pandemic does not happen, but the global financial crisis does, but with many other links between the novels.

This her sixth novel, to be published later in 2022, is I think best scene as a companion novel to both of its predecessors.

It is set in the “parallel universe” of “The Glass Hotel” – one which at least until 2021 mirrors our own (no Georgia Flu, but a Financial Crisis including the Alkaitis Ponzi scheme and its repercussions) and with explicitly repeating characters (particularly the two wives – Mirella and Vincent – their post crash encounter in “The Glass Hotel” where Mirella refuses to acknowledge Vincent is replayed here from Mirella’s viewpoint).

But it also features a character - Olive Llewelyn – who is an author of a novel “Marienbad” (I assume as a nod by Mandel to the film “Last Year at Marienbad” which per Wikipedia is “famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which time and space are fluid, with no certainty over what is happening to the characters, what they are remembering, or what they are imagining”). For Olive after “three books that no one noticed” her fourth novel pandemic-based dystopian novel (not difficult to see the parallels) suddenly made her feel that she had slipped into a “parallel world ………. a bizarre upside down world where people actually read my work”. That novel (which in one key moment has a character rehearsing a line from King Lear) is now being made into a film so she is touring to promote it – later her book sales take off even more during an actual pandemic. In further self-referentiality Olive, whose first main section of the novel is set during a book tour and the second during a lockdown virtual book tour answers questions about what it is like to talk about a book about a pandemic in a pandemic, how many additional sales she has gathered post pandemic, admits the “scientifically implausible flu” in her novel and is critiqued for the “anticlimactical” death scene of the prophet (all of course explicit allusions to “Station Eleven”).

Now Olive’s book tour takes place in 2203 and while based on the Earth begins from her home on a lunar Colony – because this book even more firmly than “Station Eleven” is a science fiction book, with I have to say a plot that reminds me of Harry Harrison and Dr Who.

The book has a Cloud Atlas type nested structure – and of course it is increasingly clear that Mandel shares much of the same multiverse approach as Mitchell – while perhaps I think exploring the idea with more depth and empathy.

The first part of the book takes place in 1912 – an 18 year old third son Edwin St Andrew St John of a rich and titled English family is exiled (after some uncomfortable remarks about the Empire and his mother’s beloved and much mourned Raj – the first sign incidentally that this is a book about lost and mourned for worlds) to Canada (as a “Remittance man”) where he ends on the Island of Caiette (later of course home of The Glass Hotel – actually called Hotel Caiette). There he has a weird experience in a forest (involving a violin and an inexplicable loud noise) shortly after meeting a mysterious priest – Roberts - with a strange accent.

The action then moves to 2020 – as Mirelle waits outside a concert by Paul (to see what she can find out about his sister Vincent) they are joined by an odd man – Gaspery Roberts – who is keen to find out about a glitch in one of Vincent’s forest-based videos which Paul has set to violin music, and who Mirelle recognises from a traumatic childhood incident.

We then move forwards to Olive’s book tour – and an encounter with a journalist who shares a name Gaspery-Jacques – with a character in Marienbad and who is keen to understand about an odd scene in her novel (which seems to have echoes of Edwin’s trauma and Paul/Vincent’s video – a man playing violin in an airship terminal and a sudden juxtaposition of a forest) – one she admits may have biographical elements.

And then in 2401 we meet Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a hotel detective from the Night City on the moon, who is co-opted into a programme to investigate anomalies in time and we return to each of the previous stories in turn.

Interestingly for me this part contains an interesting reflection on bureaucracy “bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-preservation” which had strong (if controversial) resonances for me of some of the ways in which the UK COVID response has played out. I do not think this was in any way intended but (just as with “Glass House” and “Station Eleven” it is the strength, universality and topicality of Mandel’s writing that it sets of such unintended resonances).

Olive’s sections start with her literary musings on dystopia and pandemic literature (why one would write it, why readers are attracted to it) in ways which beautifully explore why “Station Eleven” has proved so popular. Later we get extremely resonant reflections on a pandemic – how the world of home can feel like a lost world when one is travelling for work, but how the world of work and travel can feel like a lost world in lockdown.

Overall this is a book which in a science fiction sense moves beyond parallel worlds to explore time travel and the nature of reality against simulation, but which really in an thematic sense (and like all of Mandel’s trilogy of recent books) is much more of a both a love letter to and requiem for our current world, an exploration of belonging, loss, of technology, of relationships, of what provides ultimate fulfillment and where value is ultimately found.

As a standalone novel I am not fully sure how this works (and I do not think it matches the complexity of "Station Eleven") – as part of a body of work it is brilliant.

Emily has really outdone herself with this book, it is simply amazing. I had to take a couple of days before writing this review to just think about it. The power of the writing and ideas in this story will stay with me.

Starting in the year 1912 through to 2401, the reader follows a variety of different people’s experience of an anomaly in time and the time traveller from the future who is sent back to investigate it. The story jumps back and forth between time zones but it is done in a way that isn’t confusing at all and very easy to keep track of where you are.

I really don’t want to say too much as this is the sort of book that each individual will take away something different with them when they finish. There are many themes running throughout: love, family, experience, pandemics, loneliness, consequences, choices, hope, despair, and well, just what it is to be human, which doesn’t change whether you live on Earth or a moon colony! While there are nods to both of her previous books, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, be warned that it does give away a bit of what happened in The Glass Hotel which may spoil that story for you if you haven’t read it.

This is definitely one of those special books that I will keep on my shelves to go back to and reread.