Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is a book of literary science fiction. The book description from the publisher describes it best: “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.”

Sea of Tranquility is the latest book of literary science fiction—more literary than scientific—from Emily St. John Mandel about time travel that crosses many centuries from the early twentieth century to five hundred years later. We follow an exiled young socialite on his journey to Canada from England, an author from a moon colony on her book tour down on Earth, and a detective as they each witness a vision of a violinist in an airport terminal, an experience disconcerting to all of them as it’s out of context to their life experience. What is this aural glitch? That’s the heart of the narrative to this compelling and beautifully written novel.