The first half of Sea of Tranquility moves forward in time through three stories - Edwin’s in 1912, Mirella’s in 2020, and Olive’s in 2203. John Mandel instead means to pick up where another masterpiece left off? Like Sea of Tranquility, the real-life 1961 avant-garde French film “ Last Year at Marienbad” is focused on the meaning of reality, the flow of time, and the validity of memory.

It follows, then, that Sea of Tranquility seeks to capture how people feel during pandemics, right? Fear, confusion, and longing distort the passage of time, especially for the character Olive, who is on a book tour to support her blockbuster novel Marienbad. Incomprehensible danger suffuses settings that should be beautiful. John Mandel wrote and published Sea of Tranquility during a pandemic, so the novel must be about pandemics, right? Well, unseen, ubiquitous doom is its overall feeling. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the 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.Ī 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.Bestselling author Emily St. Within the text of Olive's bestselling 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. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. 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.

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. 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 three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.Įdwin St.

Sea of tranquility a novel