My most anticipated book of 2022 so far! And I was not let down one bit.

I was reading the last quarter of this book at a bar, slightly buzzed, listening to a music station that seemed to play all upbeat music. All of a sudden “Dreams” by the Cranberries comes on at a pivotal moment in the book, and it fits perfectly. In fact, this whole book would make a great movie which I thought about Station Eleven as well (and I was pleased to watch the miniseries a few years after reading that book). It would be really cool to hear a musical score made for this story (would have to include violins and space sounds).

I’m not going to give an overview of what happens because this is definitely one of the stories that needs to unfold without any expectations. I love reading a book without knowing anything about it, but being confident that it’s worth reading. I’ve read a couple other books by Emily St John Mandel (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel). I was more than pleasantly surprised. That same feeling of melancholy that permeates Mandel’s books is in this one as well, but there is also a lot of hope. Give it a read, and consider absorbing yourself in this novel while in a bar of coffee shop enjoying your favorite beverage. It helps to even out the melancholy vibe. 😊 Thank you to Knopf Publishing for the advanced release copy in exchange for my honest review.

To start off, please understand that I A) loved Station Eleven by the same author and B) received this book as a free eARC from Netgalley, so take all comments with the grain of salt appropriate to the situation. That being said, I definitely enjoyed this gem of a novel (even if the large variety of narrators, time periods, and shifting/colliding timelines left me feeling almost as lost as the main character on a few occasions). The main theme of the novel is one that has been explored in philosophy for centuries and in fictional worlds from The Matrix right through to the new Free Guy film: how would we know if we were living in a simulation? I won’t give you the author’s conclusion, as that would be spoiling things, but I will tell you that it is one of the most compelling answers to that question that I have yet received.
One more note: If you loved Station Eleven, get ready for a few highly enjoyable if disorienting moments. One of the side characters is an author who wrote a book about a pandemic a few years before a pandemic broke out on her future version of earth, and who then had that book turned into a film (sound familiar?). Those of you who have read Station Eleven will enjoy spending a few chapters desperately trying to figure out how much of the story is fiction and how much of it is fictionalized reality, which adds another fine layer of intrigue to the tale.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel should be popular book this spring. The book goes through several time periods and has time travel. The reader starts in 1912 with Edwin St. Andrew who is exiled to Canada. I enjoyed Edwin's story line in the book. Olive Llewellyn is an author on tour on Earth two decades later. Olive lives on the second moon colony. Olive wrote a best selling novel about a pandemic. I did not feel this story line was trying to mimic what we have been living for the past two years. I have found some pandemic storylines hit too close to home and do not make reading an escape from day to day reality. Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is a detective that is investigating anomalies in history and he time travels to get to the bottom of these mysteries. These anomalies tie Gaspery to Edwin and Olive.

I enjoyed this book and it really held my attention. I think I finished it in a couple of days. I have also enjoyed other books by Emily St. John Mandel so I was excited to get an advance copy of this book for an honest review. #NetGalley #SeaofTranquility #EmilyStJohnMandel

I loved the way Mandel explores scenes from one perspective and then will come back to the experience from a different characters point of view to add layers and context to the story. Mind bending fun told through different time periods that are all connected.

What an interesting examination of reality, so dependent on what we choose to believe and if we let it affect our daily lives. I loved the way this novel loops around itself with time travel. Though the depiction of life 2 centuries from now seemed not nearly futuristic enough, the themes of loneliness and need for human connection carried over well into the future.

Thanks to NetGalley and Alfred A Knopf Books for the ARC to read and review.

Oh, she's just so good isn't she? I've been an ESJM fan since Last Night in Montreal, so I appreciated her before Station Eleven (and LOVED Station Eleven). This new one will definitely appeal to all of the people who met her through Station Eleven - it has some of those same plague/literature/survival/humanity themes and is also just super fun to read. Loved it.

Sea of Tranquility
by Emily St. John Mandel
Pub Date: April 5, 2022
Knopf
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for this ARC. The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
A short read, but it packs a lot of punch! f 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.
4 stars

Satisfying and literary time travel novel that includes some character crossover with The Glass Hotel.. Great stuff.

Absolutely excellent - St. John Mandel lures you in with her usual direct, concise way of writing all while setting out enough intrigue to hook you. I always love a well done story with different timelines; it can feel like I'm in an upside down snow globe, and I'm fascinated with the way authors can jumble and reassemble a story in order to make it all the more poignant.

This is what St. John Mandel has done with "Sea of Tranquility". The reader will be intrigued and confused, and the line in the book (buried in the fiction book) "we should have known" will absolutely be haunting but never horrifying. The author always leaves just enough hope and reminders of what is most important in this world to push the story forward.

Incredibly timely, and perhaps a bit autobiographical in different places, I loved this novel and would highly recommend it. Reminscent of "Station Eleven", and yet its own unique work, readers will be drawn in with its nods to historical fiction, science fiction and time travel. Absolutely excellent.

A stunning work that has stuck with me since I finished reading it. I can't recommend this read enough. I loved it, and loved it more than Station Eleven.

I was a huge fan of Station Eleven and loved The Glass Hotel as well, so I had high hopes for Sea of Tranquility, and it didn't disappoint. This was a surprisingly quick read, moving back and forth between different time frames, ranging from the early 20th century to a few centuries in the future. I was a little nervous about this, knowing that there would be some pandemic content, but it was handled really well within the structure of the story. I liked that this referenced Vincent from The Glass Hotel and brought her history into the story, and I found myself chuckling at Olive Llewellyn, a 22nd century author living on the second moon colony who is doing a book tour on Earth to promote her book about a pandemic... which sounds a lot like Station Eleven. She spends time during a pandemic being frequently interviewed about writing a pandemic novel just before a pandemic actually happened, and I can only assume that Emily St. John Mandel was drawing from some personal experience. There are a lot of classic sci fi tropes in this, like the possibility of time travel and discussions of the simulation hypothesis, which are somehow handled both playfully and seriously - I don't know how she does it. This also has one of the most satisfying endings to a novel that I've read in a long time - I laughed out loud at the way things tied up so cleverly.

This book is brilliant and hard to summarize. I can’t begin to do it justice. Suffice it to say it covers many centuries where different people experience the same anomaly and a man from the future tries to figure out its cause. This novel is about time travel, metaphysics, how different people born centuries apart are still very much people. It’s brilliant, and beautifully written, and captivating. Definitely worth reading.

I loved this book so much, I plan to buy a hard copy when it is available. The writing is beautiful and intelligent, making the reader think about the probability that our life is a simulation without being confusing or distracting. Emily St. John Mandel writes such original stories, which is so welcome when so many new books are just remakes of previous books (even book covers are all starting to look the same!).

This story is told from several points in history over 500 years. It begins in 1912 with Edwin St. Andrew as he hears a violin playing deep in the woods. As he follows the music, he is at once inside a train like terminal only for a split second. Fast forward 200 years, Olive Llewellyn is an author, from the second moon colony, traveling all over Earth. Her book contains a story of a violin playing man in an air terminal as forest rise around him. Then fast forward again to Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, who is hired to time travel to find a glitch in the time line that would cause the identical instances. The book was a little slow but overall I enjoyed the events in time especially as it tied back to the author's previous book, The Glass Hotel.

This book is unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and I really enjoyed it. It is a complex story, yet easy to read and follow. I am eager to read more from this author. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I fucking loved this book. I geeked out on all the genre elements (time travel! simulation hypothesis! off-earth societies!), plus she's somehow able to write about the pandemic in a way that points the reader towards hope and beauty. It's fantastic -- and frankly, exactly what I needed to read right now.

Sea of Tranquility is a must-read this year. It felt like a classic sci-fi novel, reminiscent of Robert Heinlein, with its far-flung moon colonies and time travel. While much of the story takes place in distant times and places, it hits close to home with a timeline in early 2020 before the height of the Covid-19 pandemic to a burgeoning pandemic in the future. The description hits close to home, considering what the world has gone through in the last two years. This was an excellent read. I would recommend it to anyone, especially fans of science fiction.

As much as I enjoyed Station Eleven when it was released in 2014, I was not a huge fan of St. John Mandel's long-awaited follow up novel, The Glass Hotel. Sadly, Sea of Tranquility felt like more of the same (in fact, it occurs in the same universe). While I have to applaud the author's prose style and her ability to instill a dream-like suspense in everything she writes, the story in Sea of Tranquility did not live up to my expectations. Without giving too much away, the plot focuses too much on tropes that have become overused in popular entertainment such as time travel, space colonization, and "is the universe a simulation?"-type sci-fi. Not that there's anything wrong with any of these tropes exactly, but I don't feel that Sea of Tranquility did anything especially new or interesting with them. All that being said, I think this book will have a strong audience with certain readers. If you like your sci-fi slow-paced and ethereal, this is definitely one to checkout.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.

"If there is pleasure in action, there's peace in stillness." Not even 15 pages into the book and this quote just struck me so profoundly I had to include it.

Sea of Tranquility is a beautifully written novel about love, the pandemic, time travel, the future, the past, and the present.
Without giving a rote plot summary (which I don't want to do; this is your book to discover), it's hard to convey what this book is about. It seems impossible that all the plot points are going to come together but as she has proven in her past novels, this is what she does best. Three unrelated stories (plus some loose ends from The Glass Hotel) come together seamlessly and effortlessly.

It seems that, for me at least, Emily St. John Mandel can do no wrong. This is an epic, centuries-spanning novel of science fiction, beautiful writing, and characters you will never forget. This would make a lovely book club choice, since there is much to unpack and discuss.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the advance copy to read and review. All opinions are my own.