In 1912, a young “remittance man” — an earl’s third son who aimlessly immigrated to British Columbia — stumbles into a forest and encounters a brief, inexplicable anomaly in time: a violin being played in a vast, echoing space.
Two centuries later, a bestselling book about a pandemic has been published by a writer named Olive Llewellyn, and it has made her famous. In it, there’s a passage about a violinist busking in an Oklahoma airship terminal when, for a bizarre instant, he is surrounded by a forest. How are these two things connected? How could a novelist born in a moon colony know such a thing once actually happened? How could a third person, a 21st-century girl, have experienced and recorded the same strange event in the same forest as the earl’s son in 1912? And how can a time-traveling secret agent from yet another future century discover the truth of the anomaly without disrupting time itself?
These are the questions at the heart of "Sea of Tranquility," the new novel by Emily St. John Mandel. The author of "Station Eleven" and "The Glass Hotel" has said this story was inspired by one of her favorite novels, David Mitchell’s "Cloud Atlas," and also by her lifelong fondness for speculative fiction. Elegantly written, heartbreaking and full of surprises, "Sea of Tranquility" will capture readers’ imagination and take them on a journey they will long remember. What, after all, is reading if it is not time travel?
