Sea of Tranquility

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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 fromVancouver Islandin 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 [Mandels] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet. The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrewis 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 terminalan experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellynis on a book tour. Shes traveling all over Earth, but her home isthe second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olives 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.

Reviews

WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, Goodreads, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Oprah Daily, LitHub, USA Today, San Francisco Examiner, Glamour, Mother Jones, Esquire, The Millions, TOR.com, The Weather Channel, and Kirkus

CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE ON PRESIDENT OBAMAS SUMMER READING LIST

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: TIME, Today.com, Oprah.com, Bloomberg, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Fortune, Glamour, Buzzfeed, Good Housekeeping, Vulture, Bustle, Lit Hub, Medium, Parade, PopSugar, Tech Radar, TOR.com and more

In Sea of Tranquility,Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, andproject a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apartBorn ofempathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this green-and-blue world and who one day might live well beyond.
Laird Hunt, The New York Times

Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandels previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuriesDestabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boilingMandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accountingthe type of study that tends to wear the label autofictionto a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction.
Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

Reality is things as they are, Wallace Stevens declared, and who could argue with that Well, legions of philosophers and any number of novelists, among them Emily St. John Mandel, who, like an ingenious origami artist, seems determined with each new work to add yet another fold to our perception of what is real and one further twist to what we think of as timeTranscendent.
Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal

"Mandel delivers...with an impish blend of wit and dread.The paradoxes of Gasperys adventure will be familiar to anyone whos studied Jean Baudrillard or seen Back to the Future. But Mandel has the stylistic elegance and emotional sympathy to make this more than merely an undergraduate bull session. Absent your own time portal to the 1990s, its a chance to... wrestle with the mind-blowing possibility that what is may be entirely different from what we see."
Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Bold and exciting...Sea of Tranquility is Ms Mandels most ambitious novel yet (which is saying something). Inventive and...mind-bending, thanks to her disrupted timelines and fully realised vision of lunar settlements and parallel universes...Her depiction of a future pandemic is recognisable and touching...An illuminating study of survival and, in the words of one character, 'what makes a world real.'"
The Economist

Fusing sci-fi and great storytelling, this imaginative novel from the author of Station Eleven explores how technology might control our fate if we abandon compassion.
People Magazine

"St John Mandels tender and idiosyncratic novel will undeniably make its own mark on its readers imaginations."
Alexander Larman, The Guardian

"Mandels sensational sixth novel offers immense pleasures of puzzle box plotting and high-flying imagination... Masterfully plotted and deeply moving, this visionary novel folds back on itself like a hall of mirrors to explore just what connects us to one another, and how many extraordinary contingencies bring us to each ordinary day of our lives."
Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

"This story is really about the characters, survival, and human nature.You almost forget about the dystopian backdrop and the fact that the world may be ending and instead you focus on the beauty of the storytelling, the absorbing landscape, and the way these seemingly interconnected characters living in different time periods weave together."
Hannah Loewentheil, Buzzfeed

I didn't just read Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, or Mandel's latest, Sea of Tranquility. I lived in those novels and felt the remnants of their weird, chill atmosphere long after I had to move onWorld builder is a phrase that's rightly used to describe Mandel's immersive powers as a novelistSea Of Tranquilityisa poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing novel that surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally mattersMandel is an important novelist of our moment, but doesn't settle for merely replicating our moment. She inhabits it even as she sees beyond it.
Maureen Corrigan, NPRs Fresh Air

"There is both elegance and tenderness in Mandels narrative design...For her, science fiction allows us only enough escape from our context to let us regard it from a softening distance."
Sophia Nguyen, The Nation

Lovely, life-affirmingThe project of Sea of Tranquility is about finding meaning and beauty within a world that is constantly dying, about relishing a life that seems always on the cusp of awful and irrevocable change. Mandels prose is shot through with moments of unexpected lyricismthat take you by surprise with their limpid sweetness Nourishing and needed. The world is always ending, this book says, and there is always beauty to be found in it.
Constance Grady, Vox

"If there is one thingEmily St. John Mandelis going to do, its tell a story thats so good that youll keep reading even though the plot includes pandemics and loss and the frightening future of the planet.St John Mandels swift storytelling and puncturing emotional truths will leave you wishing it was hundreds of pages longer. She remains an instant-buy writer."
Jenny Singer, Glamour

When have we everbelieved that the world wasnt ending asks a character in Emily St. John Mandels Sea of Tranquility At a time when that fear is so acutely alive, the question is revelatory. While Mandel focuses on many of the things that terrify us, she also illustrates how hope and humanity are flames that can never be fully extinguished.
Adrienne Gaffney, Elle

"If you loved Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, youll devour this dystopian novel thats about time travel and mystery as much as it is about love, the importance of family and how much our individual actions impact the world. With vivid and memorable characters, gorgeously imaginative settings and a plot that will have you gasping aloud, it ping-pongs from an eerie encounter in North America in 1912 to the anxiety of trying to escape a plague-ravaged Earth to moon colonies that feel at once just like home and far from it. This is a triumph of science fiction, so give it a try even if the genre usually leaves you cold."
Good Housekeeping

Terrible things happen in her booksworlds end, lives crash, large numbers of people diebut even as Mandel looks at these events without flinching, she also always finds a way to upend our usual takes on them. Survival, she has suggested again and again, may depend more on ones ability to love than on how well-appointed a fortress ones bunker is.Mandel almost seems to be looking straight at the readerasking us, in effect, to look beyond the spectacle of apocalypse to the long sweep of history. The point isnt the end, because there isnt a definitive end, just a series of endings. The point is what the people left do next.
Stacey DErasmo, Oprah Daily

"It is the human story that Mandel excels at portraying...Her writing on nature echoes a brutal solitude, the unease that comes when one ascends a mountain, crosses an expanse of golden plains, or finds themselves floating in space."
Nylah Burton, Shondaland

Mandel masterfully connects characters observations and senses within any given moment.Sea of Tranquility isfor anyone who wants to think about what the end of the world means, and how our lives matter in the face of it.
Megan Otto, Observer

"Reading about a pandemic when the real world is still recovering from one would have been heavy going, were it not for the unerring grace of Mandel's prose."
Olivia Ho, The Straits Times

A very knowing novelPowerfulVery enjoyableA book brimming with a sense of wonder, a sense of humour, and a sense for the weirdness weve all been experiencing over the last couple of years.
Ian Mond, Locus Magazine

I could write a thousand words about Emily St. John Mandel, and this book, and this moment but I wont dare spoil it. Truly soul-affirming.
Emma Straub, best-selling author of All Adults Here

"A spiraling, transportive triumph of storytelling - sci-fi with soul."
Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies

"Anemotionally devastating novel about human connection: what we are to one anotherand what we should be."
Omar El Akkad, Scientific American

Each character alone could probably carry a book, and so could the picture not rosy, but hardly hopeless that Mandel paints of a future EarthGenerous with flashes of wry

Author Bio

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDELs five previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which has been translated into twenty-five languages,and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, was the basis of a limited series on HBO Max, and has been translated into thirty-seven languages. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDELis available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit prhspeakers.com