Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Sea of Tranquility” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Sea of Tranquility

Emily St. John Mandel (Goodreads Author)

4.15 · Rating details · 99,539 ratings · 13,003 reviews

'NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD - 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 'NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD - 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.' ...more

Get A Copy

Hardcover, 255 pages

Published April 5th 2022 by Knopf

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Sea of Tranquility, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

The Swallows of Lunetto by Joseph Fasano

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Anticipated 2022 Literary Fiction

403 books — 375 voters

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Best Books of 2022

1,064 books — 1,184 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 4.15 ·

Rating details

· 99,539 ratings · 13,003 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of Sea of Tranquility

Apr 18, 2022 Emily May rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022, sci-fi

“Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?”

I was one of the few readers (or so it seemed) left underwhelmed by Mandel's Station Eleven when I read it back in 2014. The hype and gushing reviews seemed at odds with the very okay novel I read, which is why I passed on reading The Glass Hotel.

Now I'm wondering: should I go back and read the author's other stuff? Because I have to admit I found Sea of Tranquility riveting and beautiful.

From what I remember, it is not stylistically that different to Station Eleven-- both are quiet, slow-build stories-- but I found the characters here fascinating and the exploration of both the simulation theory and what, if anything, that means for humans, deeply moving.

We begin with several chapters (or "Parts") of seemingly unrelated characters and stories, each set in a very different time and place-- Edwin arrives in Canada in the year 1912, Mirella goes to speak to the brother of an estranged old friend in 2020 NYC, Olive visits Earth for a book tour in 2203, scientists investigate the theory that the world is a simulation in 2401. Similar motifs appear in each story and it is clear they are linked, but how?

As the stories weave together and overlap, we begin to see the recurring theme in each one until it all comes together in a big picture at the end.

I really enjoyed it. There is this nostalgic quality to Mandel's writing that made me feel like I was revisiting places I'd been long ago, even though I obviously hadn't. I don't know if all the pandemic subplots were strictly necessary and I think the author could have achieved the same goal without that being a recurring theme, but this is a small complaint.

The novel touches upon the big questions like the meaning of it all and the nature of reality, as well as exploring the human obsession with the end of the world:

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

And, in the end, it all seems to be saying that maybe there is no meaning, maybe none of it's real, whatever that means, maybe the world is always ending, and maybe the real question is: does it even matter? ...more

flag 810 likes · Like · see review

Apr 24, 2022 Maggie Stiefvater rated it it was amazing

Shelves: adult, recommended

A claustrophobic nautilus of a novel. The summary touts this as a time travel story but to me, it seemed less interested in time travel and more in a novelist's wistful musings on the harrowing transformation from *a writer, quiet observer of the world*, to *a writer, performing being a writer*— on what it means for her identity and time to be consumed as well as her novels.

I understand why the summary lingers on time travel; there is plenty of it in this book. But to me the book really boils d ...more

flag 493 likes · Like · see review

Apr 07, 2022 Lisa of Troy rated it really liked it

Sea of Tranquility is told in shifting timelines with different characters. In the timeline with Mirella, there are a bunch of different characters introduced in a relatively short period of time. To add to the confusion of this, there is a character named Vincent. However, Vincent is a female. I kept reading the passage over and over, not understanding what I was missing because I thought “she” must be referring to someone else.

The first 40% of this book was slow. However, by the 60% mark, I co ...more

flag 485 likes · Like · see review

Apr 06, 2022 John Mauro rated it it was ok

One of my most anticipated new releases of the year, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, turned out to be a watered-down rewrite of Cloud Atlas. If I were David Mitchell, I don't know whether I'd feel flattered or just profoundly ripped off.

Sea of Tranquility has exactly the same narrative structure as Cloud Atlas, consisting of interconnected stories that occur across different timelines, starting in the past and spanning into the future. Like Cloud Atlas, the opening storyline centers ...more

flag 357 likes · Like · see review

Apr 02, 2022 emma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical, reviewed, owned, reread, literary-fiction, recommend, non-ya, sci-fi, 4-and-a-half-stars

i do not know how to review this book.

even at the best of times, when i am absolutely on the ball and everything is perfect and life is going my way and i am organized and well stocked in cookies and persian cucumbers (the two best foods), the very best i can hope for in terms of how much time passes between when i read a book and when i review it is 3 weeks.

but that's beside the point, because we are firmly in the two month category on this one.

i just...don't know how to do it. i've never READ ...more

flag 345 likes · Like · see review

May 31, 2022 Nilufer Ozmekik rated it it was amazing

Breathtaking, mind blowing, complex, serene, intelligent!

Those are the first words pop into my mind when I finish the fascinating journey and one of the best books of 2022!

The main question of the book is not as simple as you may think.

What would you do when you find yourself in the middle of time corruption, a kind of unexplainable derangement where moments in time can corrupt one another?

Four people from different time zones felt the same anomaly and their fates intercepted at the same moment Breathtaking, mind blowing, complex, serene, intelligent!

Those are the first words pop into my mind when I finish the fascinating journey and one of the best books of 2022!

The main question of the book is not as simple as you may think.

What would you do when you find yourself in the middle of time corruption, a kind of unexplainable derangement where moments in time can corrupt one another?

Four people from different time zones felt the same anomaly and their fates intercepted at the same moment when Alan Sami plays violin the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal on 2200, thirteen years old Vincent in the woods of Caiette, northern Vancouver island in early 2000s to film the forest with her camera as Edwin St. John St. Andrew takes his long steps to the same woods in 1812 and the famous sci-fi author Olive Llewellyn walks in the platform of airship terminal in the same time line with Alan Sami performs the enchanting notes.

Both people feel the music and feel the forest, the background voices of platform and different qualities of their own time zones. But how this could be possible! What’s the reason behind the anomaly?

A man called Gaspery- Jacques Roberts starts connecting with this people asking questions about that moment they heard the violin. What they all felt? How could they visually transport themselves to different time zones?

Gaspery Jacques is also a character name belongs to Olive Llewellyn’s best selling novel. But how did she name her character with the same name of a man she’s never seen before?
Who is this Gaspery Jacques? Why he doesn’t get aged? What is his purpose to interrogate the people?

This book is marvelous symphony for my heart and soul! There are some great references of the author’s previous works: Station Eleven and Glass Hotel. And Olive Llewellyn might be reflection of the author who writes a pandemic book in the middle of the pandemic.

This is spectacular and I don’t know how much I can say more and scream loud to convince you to read it asap! Well, I highly advice you to read it asap! This is one of the best things I’ve truly devoured and enjoyed this year! ...more

flag 309 likes · Like · see review

Sep 28, 2022 Dr. Appu Sasidharan rated it it was amazing

Space travel is always an exciting yet perilous proposition.

Similarly, this journey through space and time by Emily St. John Mandel is an exciting yet precarious way to create a novel. A simple mistake might have made this whole attempt a futile one.

In this book, you will have to get yourself ready for a roller coaster ride transcending centuries, planets, and pandemics.

"I think you'd want to visit all those points in time," Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 19
...more

flag 252 likes · Like · see review

Apr 12, 2022 jessica rated it liked it · review of another edition

nothing makes me feel more dumb than reading a time travel book. lol.

i have no idea what it is, but my brain just cant comprehend the concept enough to enjoy stories that use it as a plot device. which is such a shame because i really love ESJMs writing style - its just as lovely and lyrical in this as it is in her previous books. and i said before, when ESJM wrote about a ponzi scheme (one of the dullest topics on earth), that its not what her books say, but how they say it, that makes her sto ...more

flag 245 likes · Like · see review

Jan 08, 2022 Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022

2022 Goodreads Choice Science Fiction Novel of the Year but also a major highlight of my literary fiction year.

"Is this the Promised End" – Shakespeare, King Lear

"August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes there had to be one where there had been no pandemic …… or one where they’d been a pandemic, but the virus had a subtly different genetic structure, some miniscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally i

...more

flag 216 likes · Like · see review

Apr 03, 2022 Melissa ~ Bantering Books rated it it was amazing

Shelves: arc-physical-copy, favorites

Be sure to visit Bantering Books to read all my latest reviews.

“… what she found at that moment, as the lights of yet another ambulance flickered over the ceiling, was that it was possible to smile back. This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”

Emily St. John Mandel brought me out of a writing slump. This is the first book review I’ve written in months, and not only do I want to share my thoughts regarding her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility ...more

flag 229 likes · Like · see review

Apr 14, 2022 Holly rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook, fantasy-science-fiction, 2022-read

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It's very much a 'written during the pandemic' book. It also almost requires you to have already read The Glass Hotel, and it even has a passing reference to Station Eleven. But both of those prior books are better than this one in my opinion. The plot of this book felt like a hodge podge of ideas - life in outer space, the future, life as an author, living through a pandemic, and the morality of time travel. But what really threw me off was the almost com ...more

flag 167 likes · Like · see review

Apr 09, 2022 Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

WOW….”Sea of Tranquility” is soooooo COOL….
….tender and sweet…. mysterious….sad…..reflective….relevant….
….dazzling…..original…..wonderful….
LOVE …..LOVE…..Emily St. John Mandel!!!

Having ‘never’ missed reading one novel by Emily —in order—
…..having read (and own every physical book she’s written)….having the joy of meeting her — Canadian novelist and essayist…..[home schooled until age 15; left high school at age 18 to study contemporary dance]….
….Emily had been writing in her diary daily fro ...more

flag 162 likes · Like · see review

Apr 05, 2022 Sujoya (semi-hiatus till the end of the year) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: signed-books-i-own, signed-first-editions, favorites

“What it was like to leave Earth: A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.”

In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew finds himself crossing the Atlantic after being exiled by his aristocratic family in England on account of his disparaging remarks on colonialism at his family’s dinner t “What it was like to leave Earth: A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.”

In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew finds himself crossing the Atlantic after being exiled by his aristocratic family in England on account of his disparaging remarks on colonialism at his family’s dinner table. His travels take him to Canada and eventually he lands in the settlement in Caitte. Here, one day while walking in the woods, he experiences “a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound” - an unnatural experience he shares in a letter to his family. In the summer of 1994, thirteen-year-old Vincent Smith is walking through the same woods recording her surroundings on video – a recording that her composer brother shares accompanied with his background score during a 2020 performance in New York City – a video that has a glitch- sudden darkness accompanied by violin music, a "whoosh” sound, a “dim cacophony”- that lasts a few moments. In the year 2203, an author by the name of Olive Llewellyn, a resident of the second moon colony, travels to Earth on a book tour to promote her post-apocalyptic novel, "Marienbad" which revolves around a pandemic. A passage in her novel describes one of her characters who, while traveling through Oklahoma City Airship Terminal stops to listen to a violinist and experiences “a fleeting hallucination of forest, fresh air, trees rising around him, a summer’s day”.

An anomaly? A glitch in a simulated reality? A file corruption? A break in reality? Are discrete realities bleeding into each other?

In the year 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a security professional employed with the Grand Luna Hotel in the first moon colony - is hired by the Time Institute and is assigned to investigate these unnatural occurrences . Gaspery travels back and forth through time and space , visiting and revisiting the people and the places, witnessing the mysterious events. He meets the son of the aristocrat, the brother and a close friend of the young girl who recorded the video and the author who admits her passage was based on an experience she had traveling through the same terminal. He also finds a fourth individual – the violinist Alan Sami whose music features in those visions. In the course of his travels, he comprehends the fragility of time travel and the ripples that any anomaly can create and finds it increasingly difficult to exercise the “almost inhuman level of detachment” that is required of him on his mission knowing that any manipulation of the timeline will bring with it dire consequences for himself.

A lot is going on in this relatively short novel (my ebook was 252 pages long) but the author’s narrative is structured such that it never feels rushed or too heavy. The author combines themes of time travel, life-threatening pandemics, space travel and other futuristic elements in a tightly woven narrative. The speculative /sci-fi elements are presented in a light and uncomplicated manner and strike a fine balance with the human element of the novel and the themes of family, survival, hope and humanity. Initially, the multiple threads of this novel may seem a tad disjointed, but the author does a marvelous job building up the suspense and brings everything together with a surprising revelation at the end. I also found the discussion (from the perspective of Olive Llewellyn) on the factors that influence the popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction quite interesting.

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

I fell in love with Emily St. John Mandel’s writing after reading Station Eleven– a feeling that was reinforced after reading The Glass Hotel. Naturally, my expectations were high for Sea of Tranquility. With masterful storytelling , themes that resonate and concise and straightforward prose in a well-paced narrative that keeps you turning pages till the very end, Sea of Tranquility does not disappoint! There are references to events and characters from The Glass Hotel and Olive Llewellyn’s novel "Marienbad" appears to be similar to the author’s Station Eleven .Though I feel reading The Glass Hotel prior to this novel would enrich the reading experience, Sea of Tranquility can be enjoyed as a standalone novel for those who have not read The Glass Hotel . I was thrilled to receive a skip-the-line loan from my local library! I promptly set aside my other 'current'reads and finished this book in a day. I know it is only April but I am confident that this novel will feature among my top 10 reads of 2022! ...more

flag 141 likes · Like · see review

May 08, 2022 Kay ❅*⍋⍋*❅ rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, canada, lgbt, fantasy, science-fiction, kindle, historical-fiction, libby, library-c

No star burns forever.

2.5⭐
This time-traveling novel follows characters from 4 different centuries. I thought the future would be my favorite but quite the opposite, 1912 grabbed my attention the most, a young man who saw something strange in a forest. He arrived in Halifax and traveled across Canada, descriptions of the landscape were incredible.

The present-day (2020) story was confusing for me and I had to listen a few times. A woman captures a strange anomaly on video. But she's not any woman ...more

flag 132 likes · Like · see review

Nov 27, 2021 Carolyn Walsh rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is a wonderful, perplexing novel of soaring imagination. It draws on speculative physics, metaphysics, and science fiction in an original, thought-provoking manner. What if what we consider our reality is actually a manufactured simulation? The controls carry a glitch (or file corruption) that bleeds or melds together moments from the past, present, and future for an instant over the centuries. The theory is with the advance of holograms and virtual reality; this is a technical possibility This is a wonderful, perplexing novel of soaring imagination. It draws on speculative physics, metaphysics, and science fiction in an original, thought-provoking manner. What if what we consider our reality is actually a manufactured simulation? The controls carry a glitch (or file corruption) that bleeds or melds together moments from the past, present, and future for an instant over the centuries. The theory is with the advance of holograms and virtual reality; this is a technical possibility far in the future. Perhaps the sounds, smells, the people, and the world we see around us, and what we consider the reality of our lives is only a simulation.

In 1912, Edwin St. Andrew was exiled from his family's estate in England and is now living as a remittance man in the wilderness of British Columbia. He is indolent and spends his time wandering in the forest. He is shocked to hear violin music played in an airship terminal, falls ill, and believes he has suffered hallucinations. He is questioned by a man impersonating a priest.

In 2020, a young girl filming old-growth trees experienced an anomaly, disrupting time and place.

Olive Llewellen lives on Moon Colony 2 in the year 2203. She is on a book tour scheduled to take her through the colonies and Earth to promote her pandemic novel that has become a bestseller. This is the beginning of a deadly pandemic, soon to lead to lengthy lockdowns and death.

In the future, at about 2400, a hotel security guard, Gaspery, is finding his work boring. He has learned that his sister and a boyhood friend are employed in prominent positions at the Time Institute. He manages to get accepted there and is given an assignment after lengthy training. Time travel has already been invented but is mainly outlawed. Problems have arisen from time travellers making mistakes or breaking the rules, altering timelines. The Time Institute works at restoring these changes. Those charged are imprisoned or made to vanish.

Gaspery's assignment is to go back in time to different years and places and interview the man playing the violin and three others who have experienced the anomalies. He must be impartial and resist any urges to better his subjects' futures. Can he overcome his humanity? Can he solve what is causing the glitches or disruptions?

Many thanks to NetGalley, HarperCollins Canada, and Sarah Gregory for this splendid, memorable, mind-boggling book. ...more

flag 126 likes · Like · see review

Mar 03, 2022 Andrew Smith rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, time-travel, netgalley

In the author’s last novel The Glass Hotel we were introduced to Vincent and her half-brother Paul and we learned of a link to a Ponzi Scheme which was to have tragic consequences. Well, we are to meet them again here. It’s not clear to what extent their back story is a pivotal element but this is one of the quirky and interesting things about Mandel’s books: she sets about things in a slightly different way to other writers I’ve come across, teasing and surprising in equal measure.

In addition In the author’s last novel The Glass Hotel we were introduced to Vincent and her half-brother Paul and we learned of a link to a Ponzi Scheme which was to have tragic consequences. Well, we are to meet them again here. It’s not clear to what extent their back story is a pivotal element but this is one of the quirky and interesting things about Mandel’s books: she sets about things in a slightly different way to other writers I’ve come across, teasing and surprising in equal measure.

In addition to the continuing discoveries regarding Vincent and Paul we are also taken back in time to a Vancouver forest and forward to time to when lunar colonies are in place. Each segment offers up sight of a slightly puzzling event. How are these individual moments in time linked, and is there a broader significance? It’s clear from the far future view that pandemics and global warming have, to some extent, driven development and exploration. There’s a lot at play here and we haven’t even gotten to the time travel element yet.

If the first half of the book is a slow scene setter then the second half offers much more in terms of both pace and discovery. Aficionados of time travel tales will spot some of the usual tropes, but (as a reader of many such tales) I believe there’s definitely something new here, a different puzzle to solve. Mandel eschews the need for detailed breakdowns of how it’s all done, preferring instead to focus on the bigger picture and on the plight of the characters she’s introduced us to. I found this approach refreshing, I must admit. It’s a relatively short book, coming in at under three hundred pages, but there’s a good deal packed in.

If I have a grumble, it’s that I’d have liked some of the characters to have been fleshed out a little more and I thought some of the transitions in the second half of the book felt a little rushed - for instance, at one point a major character takes a controversial and determining action, seemingly without any forethought. But these are minor quibbles as I believe that once again Mandel has produced a thoughtful and compulsively readable story, one that certainly ticked a lot of boxes for me.

As a final thought, if you haven’t read The Glass Hotel don’t worry, this one works just fine as a stand-alone piece.

My thanks to Pan Macmillan, Picador for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ...more

flag 121 likes · Like · see review

Jul 22, 2021 Henk rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Enjoyable snippets of life that are tied together via time travel. Far from hardcore science fiction, the focus of the author is on human connection, serendipity, free will and morality
I think as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism.

More like 3.5 stars, with for me it being serendipitous how closely some of the core messages of the book, on duty to future people and the weight of choices in the now, are to this recent YouT ...more

flag 117 likes · Like · see review

Apr 04, 2022 karen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: review-pending, from-publisher-or-author

day six of my "i have covid readathon!"

i am so glad i finally had time to read this one. thanks, covid! i'm also very pleased that i got the indie bookstore edition with the extra chapter AND that someone sent me the extra content from the BN-exclusive edition, so all my S.O.T. bases are covered.

thoughts TK!

*************************

new shower curtain, early copy of Sea of Tranquility:

if you tell me it gets better than this, i will not believe you.

in other news, my side-career photographing lite ...more

flag 118 likes · Like · see review

Mar 30, 2022 Jasmine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Sea of Tranquility will transport the reader throughout time.

Emily St. John Mandel’s latest release loosely connects to her previous books Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel.

This story follows several characters in the past, present, and future. It begins in 1912 when Edwin St. Andrew, exiled from his family for his views on colonialism, experiences something so inexplicable he believes he imagined it.

About a century later, Mirella wants to reconnect with her old friend Vincent and learn more ...more

flag 117 likes · Like · see review

May 13, 2022 Charlotte May rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, illness-mental-terminal, sci-fi

Man. I really loved this 💖

An epic novel in less than 300 pages!

We follow several characters in different timelines, from 1912 when Edwin St Andrew makes the trip from England to British Columbia to begin a new life, an author 2 centuries later travelling on her book tour across Earth.

Both characters have one thing in common, they have experienced a strange phenomenon. A break in the universe. Edwin, when he was in a forest beneath a maple tree, but heard a violin playing and a strange whoosh no ...more

flag 116 likes · Like · see review

Apr 25, 2022 Swrp rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: review-coming-soon

"Sometimes you don`t know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin."

review-coming-soon ...more

flag 108 likes · Like · see review

Jul 08, 2022 Jennifer ~ TarHeelReader rated it it was amazing

10 stars!

What a gift to readers bestowed by Emily St. John Mandel. In the last two weeks, I’ve had a marathon reading session of Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility (shoutout to my friend, Debbie, for the suggestion). Also, I rarely binge books, but this author is completely binge-worthy. While not a series, there are character cameos and stories that come together between the three books. My reviews of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel are on @goodreads.

Of the three, this i ...more

flag 106 likes · Like · see review

Mar 09, 2022 luce (overcome by a restless wretchedness) rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: cover-love, disappointing-reads, lgbtqia-side, 2022-reviews, 5-so-so-reads

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀

Cloud-Atlas-esque novels seem to be all the rage in 2022…

“This place is precarious, that’s the only word for it. It’s the lightest sketch of civilizations, caught between the forest and the sea. He doesn’t belong here”

This is my third novel by Mandel and once again I have rather conflicting thoughts and feelings about her work. On the one hand, I recognize how talented a writer she is. Her prose has this cool yet delicate quality to it tha ...more

flag 93 likes · Like · see review

May 14, 2022 Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ rated it it was amazing

Shelves: speculative-fiction, plagues-and-pandemics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. How would we know if we're living in a simulation? Could we even know?

The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostram posited that one of the following must be true:

"1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities;

2) If any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or

3) Advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and tha ...more

flag 91 likes · Like · see review

Dec 20, 2021 Hannah rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: arc, loved-it, 2022-release, fiction

I have not been able to stop thinking about this book but at the same time I have trouble putting my thoughts and feelings into words. This is brilliant. I knew very little going into this book except that I will read anything Emily St. John Mandel writes and as such the book surprised me again and again. It is losely connected to her most recent two novels, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, and I love her extended universe so much. She does this better than David Mitchell, whose writing I als ...more

flag 91 likes · Like · see review

Apr 18, 2022 JanB marked it as dnf

Dnf at 41%

I loved The Glass Hotel, and it was one of my top books of 2020.

This one is more speculative fiction, and not for me. If I’m not sure by 41% what is happening and why, then it’s time to call it and move on to another book.

flag 90 likes · Like · see review

Apr 12, 2022 Ron Charles rated it really liked it

Emily St. John Mandel’s wildly anticipated novel, “Sea of Tranquility” is a curious thought experiment that borrows from the plague terror she spun in “Station Eleven” and the perception-bending tricks she played in “The Glass Hotel.” (Fans will even catch some characters from that previous novel flickering through this new one.)

“Sea of Tranquility” is an elegant demonstration of Mandel’s facility with a range of tones and historical periods. The novel opens in 1912 when Edwin, a young Englishma ...more

flag 91 likes · Like · see review

Apr 21, 2022 Blaine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022, e-book

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
…
“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”

“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.

“Interesting. Can you te

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
…
“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”

“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.

“Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”

“I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged.”

“I suppose anything written this year is likely to be deranged,” the journalist said, and Olive decided she liked her.

At the end of my review for The Glass Hotel, I asked “What were the odds that Ms. Mandel would release a book during the aftermath of the Great Recession about a pandemic, and then release a book during a pandemic about the Great Recession? The timing is almost impossible to believe.” But I was asking the wrong question. Because the timing of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel were, ultimately, unforeseeable coincidences. What I should have asked was “what story would an author as brilliant as Emily St. John Mantel choose to write during a pandemic after having lived the experience of becoming a world-famous author as a result of writing a post-pandemic novel a few years before an actual pandemic”?

Sea of Tranquility takes place in four different timelines. In 1918, Edwin St. Andrew is traveling through Canada after being exiled from his British family. In 2020, Mirella Kessler is in Manhattan looking for Vincent Alkaitis, the central character from The Glass Hotel. In 2203, author Olive Llewellyn—who’s most famous novel Marienbad was about a pandemic (“a scientifically implausible flu”) and its survivors—has left her home in the second moon colony to travel around Earth for a book tour. And finally, in 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is investigating an anomaly in the North American wilderness that somehow links these threads together.

I do not want to say anymore about the plot of Sea of Tranquility for risk of spoilers. But I do want to get back to my question of what Ms. Mandel would write about during a pandemic, which means discussing Olive, as obvious a stand-in for an author as has happened in literature. On the surface, Ms. Mandel uses Olive to talk about book tours, discuss some of the casual sexism she faces from people for daring to be both a professional writer and a mother, and to talk some smack about a contemporary author that I think is Sally Rooney. Then the book goes further, using the book tour to have Olive defend the subtlety of her writing (deliberately anti-climatic as opposed to falsely cinematic) and to discuss why post-apocalyptic fiction has gotten so popular over the last decade. But ultimately, Ms. Mandel uses Olive to seemingly work through her own feelings of watching the birth of an actual pandemic, and underestimating how bad it would get, from her unique position as a writer most famous for a novel about a pandemic. Olive’s presence in the novel seems to be an attempt to grapple with superstitious feelings that she somehow wrote a pandemic into existence. It is fascinating, all the more so for taking place within a much larger story.

Sea of Tranquility is exactly what you’d expect from Emily St. John Mantel. It’s a beautiful story, and very well-plotted, moving back and forth over different time period to tell the slowly connecting stories. While not forming a trilogy with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel (because the latter takes place in our world while the former is, at least for now, truly fictional), Sea of Tranquility connects the two in a sort of triangle. The writing is dazzling, with exceptional characterization and descriptions, and without ever feeling forced or pretentious. Once again, Ms. Mantel has written an accessible, thought-provoking, moving work of literary fiction. Highly recommended. ...more

flag 86 likes · Like · see review

May 13, 2022 Melissa ♥ Dog/Wolf Lover ♥ Martin rated it liked it

Shelves: 3-stars, audio, fiction, dnf-skim-finish, library-book, if-i-don-t-give-a-review-don-t-ask

The audio book was good.

Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾

flag 80 likes · Like · see review

Jun 21, 2022 Kate The Book Addict rated it it was amazing

Shelves: characters-i-want-to-meet, take-this-book-to-the-beach, betrayal, deception, don-t-mess-with-women, fantasy, futuristic-happening-now, gotta-read-it-again, lgbtq, dystopian

“Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”
Emily St John Mandel has poetically interwoven hundreds of years’ of different stories that force us to question what is real, and our roles in reality. All characters have been shaken to their cores by an extremely unusual event that links them eternally together. It’s so hard to write about this great book without giving too much away, so I’ll say if you loved the author’s previous books, you’re really in for a treat now. Great summer read.

flag 76 likes · Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
Tournament of Books: Sea of Tranquility	1	23	Dec 19, 2022 08:49AM
Play Book Tag: Sea of Tranquility - Mandel - 3 stars	1	11	Oct 30, 2022 02:09PM
Shine & Shadow: Sea of Tranquility – Spoilers Galore	11	29	Oct 27, 2022 09:58PM
Shine & Shadow: Sea of Tranquility - Initial Thoughts	10	26	Oct 25, 2022 05:08PM
Play Book Tag: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel 4 stars	6	15	Oct 10, 2022 09:20AM
Challenge Corner: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel -> Starting September 17th, 2022	7	13	Sep 24, 2022 11:53AM

Readers also enjoyed

See similar books…

Genres

Fiction

2,059 users

Science Fiction

1,733 users

Science Fiction > Time Travel

556 users

Historical > Historical Fiction

467 users

Fantasy

447 users

Audiobook

354 users

Literary Fiction

317 users

Adult

242 users

Speculative Fiction

213 users

Science Fiction Fantasy

160 users

See top shelves…

About Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel

17,919 followers

Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Aw ...more

Books by Emily St. John Mandel

More…

Articles featuring this book

Discover the Winners of the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards!

With more than 5.7 million votes cast and counted, the 14th Annual Goodreads Choice Awards are now official. Launched in 2009,...

Quotes from Sea of Tranquility

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” — 104 likes

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.” — 47 likes

More quotes…

See a Problem?

Preview — Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About Emily St. John Mandel

Books by Emily St. John Mandel

Articles featuring this book

Quotes from Sea of Tranquility

See a Problem?

Preview — Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Genres

About Emily St. John Mandel

Books by Emily St. John Mandel

Articles featuring this book

Quotes from Sea of Tranquility

new topic
Discuss This Book