NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author
of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art,
time travel, 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 the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays
into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times
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.
