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In 2014, Emily St. John Mandel took the literary world by storm with Station Eleven, her mega-bestseller about a ravaged world rebuilding after a global pandemic. Her next project followed in March 2020: The Glass Hotel, a haunting novel about one Ponzi scheme that ripples across hundreds of interconnected lives. Then, as Mandel was promoting The Glass Hotel, a real-life pandemic hit, returning Station Eleven to eerie popularity. Now, she’s publishing Sea of Tranquility, a sensational new novel featuring characters from The Glass Hotel—along with Olive Llewellyn, the fictional author of an acclaimed pandemic novel, whose book garners renewed interest when a real-life pandemic hits. The difference is, this pandemic emerges in 2203, and Olive, unlike Mandel, lives on the moon. You keeping up?
Sea of Tranquility, Mandel’s sixth novel, offers immense pleasures of puzzle box plotting and high-flying imagination. As devoted readers have come to expect from her fiction, the novel braids together a rich ensemble of characters, revealing the surprising linkages between their disparate lives. In 1912, a high-society exile is spooked by an out-of-body experience in the Canadian wilderness; in 2203, Olive endures the agonies and ecstasies of “the last book tour on Earth” while longing for her home in a lunar colony; in 2401, a…
