Sea of Tranquility

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel

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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. 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.'


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  • Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    3.5 This is my first introduction to Emily St. John Mandel and I will be back for more! The 3.5 stars does not come from what this books lacks but perhaps it just wasn't the book for me? I will start off with saying that I listened to the audiobook, and there was one narrator (Gaspery POV) that I could not get past and I think has to do with why my experience of this book went down. EJM however writes beautifully, with lofty but warranted prose. I'm looking forward to reading more from her, especially since she's a BC writer! I'm definitely most interested in The Glass Hotel, as I was previously unaware of the connection of the two books. When it comes to the characters I felt that I wasn't given enough, they felt real but just barely scratching the surface. For the length of time we spend with some of them I expected to know them more deeply, but they fell a little flat. Also, this is again on me, I didn't realize this was about time travel and therefore Sci-Fi? I really did like how everything came together, but I think that maybe had I prepped myself in some capacity my experience would have been different. idk I have more thoughts, I need to think about this some more...

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