“Sea of Tranquility” was released on April 5 and is Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel that is part time travel, part speculative fiction, and part mystery that asks: how do we handle knowing our lives might be an illusion?
Switching between multiple perspectives, the novel begins in 1912, with Edwin St. John St. Andrew exiled from his home in England following an unfortunate dinner party. He sails across the Atlantic by steamship and winds up in the fictional settlement of Caiette, where he experiences something in the woods so incomprehensible, he believes he imagined it: “He has an impression of being in some vast interior…there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound.”
More than a century later, we meet Mirella, a woman who wants to reconnect with her former friend, Vincent, because she believes she has knowledge of a Ponzi scheme that left her in financial ruin and her husband deceased. Attending a concert hosted by Vincent’s brother, she witnesses a clip of a thirteen-year-old Vincent in the summer of 1994 that shows the same thing Edwin experienced years prior in the same woods.
Olive Llewellyn, a resident of the second moon colony, is an author touring on earth…
