An enthralling story of time-travel, regret, love, the universe, and everything!
Emily St. John Mandel is a writer of extraordinary range. Her last novel, The Glass House, was based around a Ponzi scheme. With The Sea of Tranquility, she returns to the speculative framework which she last used in the very successful post-pandemic Station Eleven (recently made into a mini-series).
The story begins in 1912 with a young British man, Edwin, exiled from his family to live in Canada. We then jump to 2020 where Mirella tries to find her best friend, from whom she was estranged years before, by attending a concert by the friend’s brother. Next stop is 2203 and novelist Olive has travelled from her home in a moon colony to do a book tour of earth for the release of her latest novel. Finally, we reach 2401 and Gaspery-Jacques, investigator with the Time Institute, is sent to investigate an anomaly in time which may indicate that humans are living in a simulation.
It all sounds crazy and confusing. But the reader is in Mandel’s safe hands. This gentle, almost poetic, exploration of ideas of time and space has people firmly at its centre. Much of her…
