Sea of Tranquility
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 disrup
Themes & atmosphere
Books in conversation with Sea of Tranquility
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
Where Sea of Tranquility keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
Also by Emily St. John Mandel
All works by Emily St. John Mandel →
What you might want to know about Sea of Tranquility
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An Englishman in 1912, a writer at a moon colony in 2401, and a man named Gaspery who works for the Time Institute all hear the same strange sound in a stand of maple trees, generations apart.
Yes. Sea of Tranquility shares a connected world with The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven. Characters from both earlier novels appear, and the books are designed to enrich each other without strict reading order.
Reading Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel first deepens Sea of Tranquility's references and character connections, but Sea of Tranquility stands on its own as a literary time-travel novel.
Sea of Tranquility was written by Emily St. John Mandel, published in 1999 by Knopf.
Sea of Tranquility is 272 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Sea of Tranquility takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Sea of Tranquility is a standalone novel by Emily St. John Mandel, not part of a series.
Sea of Tranquility is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.