About the Book
Title: Sea of Tranquility
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Series: none
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 255
Edition Read: Hardcover
Dates Read: December 7 – 8, 2023
Blurb: 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.
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.
Review
This is the third book that I’ve ready by Emily St. John Mandel and this one is my favorite so far. Every book I read makes me appreciate her skill as a writer even more. She is so good at weaving together a story that has multiple timelines, multiple story tellers, and even parallel stories to her other books.
More about that last part. Her novels are standalone – they aren’t series by any means – but the three that I’ve read so far each had something in common. For some, it was just a character, mentioned in passing in one book but prominent in another. In some cases, it’s an entirely different storyline for a character, a sort of “what-if-this-didn’t-happen” moment that changes everything. Her writing really makes you think while still being very vivid and descriptive.
Also, I want to live on the moon. It sounds so cool!
The story has the one through line that multiple characters encounter – the strange phenomenon in the woods with the violinist playing – and it’s really interesting to see how all of that intersects, especially in the end. There is one heck of a plot twist that I didn’t see coming at all. I love when books do that! It really made me sit back and have to process what I had just read. Masterfully done.
GoodReads rating: 5 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
Life With No Plot 
Leave a comment