BOOKS FROM CANADASea of Tranquility
Tags:
Set in Canada
Female author
Description:
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • 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 [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.
Reviews:
(2 months ago) |
12 Aug, 2025
Loved it. Beautifully written with spare, serene prose that evokes different images, sensations and themes for different readers. Not so much plotted as choreographed for rhythm, movement and pattern. Plot seems merely a convenience to bring together disparate people and themes (including some autofiction), in a pleasing, graceful choreography.
Why do some not like it? My guess is that it is marketed as science fiction, but it may not satisfy those who want Science Fiction. Mandel seems to use SF elements merely as a framework for writing literary fiction. The novel is best suited to an audience primarily wanting fine writing, and who can enjoy the interesting possibilities of speculative fiction, but who don’t care so much about plot, things happening, world building or accurate predictions of the future.
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