June 2025 - Sea of Tranquility

 

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 

at 1pm 

Join us to discuss the novel:

Sea of Tranquility (2022)

by Emily St. John Mandel

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. (from the publisher)

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.

Resources: 

• Author's website: www.emilymandel.com
• If you need to understand the timeline a bit better (and don't mind spoilers or have finished already), wikipedia has a timeline of sorts that's hlepful. 
• Discussion questions from the publisher: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/692735/sea-of-tranquility-by-emily-st-john-mandel/9780593321447/readers-guide/ 
• Mandel discussing the book with the Barnes & Noble book club (spoilers, I'm sure)
• at 19min35sec she discusses how she "solved" the time travel problem 
  at 22m, she discusses the genre-defying nature of her books
•  

Book-adjacent Resources:

• I haven't found anywhere why she titled the book Sea of Tranquility, beyond it being a moon reference. (Did anyone else?). But here, you can learn more about Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) - the geographic feature on the moon. The feature (a mare within a basin) was named this in 1651 by Italian astronomers. It contains Tranquility Base, where Apollo 11's Eagle landed in 1969.
• More books set during a pandemic: Waterstone's list,  BookRiot's list.
• If you enjoyed this, check out Mandel's other books. Some have recurring characters (Vincent and Mirella are in The Glass Hotel).