Sea of Tranquility

A Novel

De: Emily St. John Mandel

Narrado por: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter

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.

Time travel in a contemporary best seller

A narrative that skips through time. It begins on the early 1900s and continues until several hundred years in the future. It follows the life of someone who becomes a time traveler and who struggles with dealing with foreknowledge about people he visits in his past. The idea that time travel is made possible because we live in a simulation sidesteps some of the paradoxes of time travel. But a simulation is a computer program and there is always the risk of file corruption.

Not your typical time travel novel

If you're expecting a Blake Crouch type of time travel adventure, you might want to look elsewhere. This is an "artsier" (sorry, can't think of a better word) version of time travel. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It is extremely well written and narrated story about loneliness and loss. Mandel must have written this during Covid lockdown as it plays a significant part during all of time zones travelled. I will say that for me, the book starts off a bit confusing but comes together beautifully in the end. All in all, a welcome addition to the time travel genre.

Simulated time travel

Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility suggests a time travel story, but in reality, is an investigation into the concept of our reality actually representing a simulation. The story takes place over several disparate time periods from early 20th century through to the early 25th century. Each time period is notable for an apparent 'glitch' that seems to suggest the possibility of our reality being a simulation.

While the story begins vague, it quickly progresses to an ongoing investigation by the Time Institute that works with time travel but is ascertaining the significance of the 'glitch.' During these later portions, the mysteries of the earlier time periods are gradually resolved.

The narration is well done with an excellent choice for multiple narrators. Pacing is smooth for a quick listen.

Time Travel

I have to be honest. The story did move slowly at first to me and it took awhile for it to finally tie together. I did think this was a good book, but not for me. However, I could see why others would enjoy it. One thing I did like was the ending felt very smooth and I appreciate that the author made sense of each detail and how it connected.

Provocative and beautiful

Mandel’s world is eerie and definitely not bound by the present. A detail: the narrator of the 1917 section is the same narrator of barbara Tuchman’s history of WW I. That added to the haunting experience for me.
The details of the future are matter of fact background to the very compelling story.