Sea of Tranquility: The instant Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Station Eleven
£5.70
The instant Sunday Times bestseller, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, and plays with the very line along which time should run.
‘So wise, so graceful, so rich’ – Naomi Alderman, author of The Power
‘Ingenious’ – Guardian
Lives separated by time and space have collided, and an exiled Englishman, a writer trapped far from home, and a girl destined to die too young, have each glimpsed a world that is not their own. Travelling through the centuries, between colonies on the moon and an ever-changing Earth, together their lives will solve a mystery that will make you question everything you thought you knew to be true.
From the award-winning author of Station Eleven.
A Best Book of the Year – Guardian, Oprah Daily, Barack Obama
‘Brilliant and fiercely original’ – Observer
‘One of her finest novels’ – New York Times
‘Transcendent’ – Wall Street Journal
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Additional information
| Publisher | Picador (8 April 2022) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 2980 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 274 pages |
| Page numbers source ISBN | 1443466123 |
by C4therineJ
Ok admittedly, not my favourite genre.
I love sci fi, time slips, not my favourite. But this was just sublime. I really loved the snappiness of the chapters and segments, and it was kind of light but also kind of deep…
Not trash, but also not hard sci fi. And short. So it was a nice easy read. There’s comparisons been drawn between this and Cloud Atlas, I think this is more readable…
Totally not the same, similar in as much as the segments all come together half way through the novel. I did guess where it was going, but only because this uses a pretty well explored time travel trope.. there’s only so many time travel stories you can write right?
I’ll be reading more from this author, really pleasant surprise. Comparing it to David Mitchel is unfair, whilst I enjoy Mitchell as one of my favourites, this was infinitely more readable and digestible.
by Kindle Customer
Sea of tranquility.
An excellent book that has only been given four stars due to my prejudice against time travel in science fiction. I often find time travel (with some obvious exceptions: HG Wells; Ray Bradbury; Dr Who; a couple of episodes of the original Star Trek; the Time Traveller‘s Wife) is used as a convenient ‘get out’ device and makes for poor fiction (despite this I bought the book as it is by ESJM , who I have found to be a terrific author.) This tale is very well written, with believable characters whose fate does become important to the reader. To give the book its due, the author shies away from any attempted explanation of the time travel process and builds up a picture of a time traveller moving through important, at first unconnected, events and the issue of crossed timeliness and unintended effects.
Where the book excels is in dealing with and dismissing ‘simulation’ theories. In the end they don’t matter as the moral imperatives and dilemmas of self conscious life still apply and must be faced: good/bad; choices and their implications; right/wrong; truth/lies; good faith/bad faith; all still apply and must be dealt with.
I also get the impression that more than a little of the author’s own feelings about book promotion tours may have slipped into the story.
I highly recommend this delightful tale.
by Erin
I had somehow managed not to learn anything about this book before reading, but was predictably charmed by the character work and utter humanity of the story. A quick read, but one that stays with you after you’re done.
by P. G. Harris
Sea of Tranquility is a short novel, almost a novella which I read in one setting on a train journey, from which it can be deduced that it is gripping, easily readable and enjoyable. However, for this reader at least it is a novel which, while compelling at the time, on reflection starts to fall apart somewhat.
In the early 20th century, the third son of an aristocratic family, Edward, is packed off to Canada, where, after wandering aimlessly across the continent for a few months, he ends up on the west coast. Once there he has a strange, hallucinatory experience, and that is it, apart from a coda near the end of the book. I found this rather unsatisfying, as a reader I knew enough about him to be invested in him, but the, Rosecrantz like, he was gone.
The same is true of the second section, set in the early weeks of Covid 19, where the central character, searching for a lost friend, attends a concert given by the missing person’s brother. Central to the performance is a short film clip of a strange occurrence in the woods of British Columbia. Like Edward, Mirella flits across the stage and is then gone. That said, this is the first book I’ve read by this author and I understand that, David Mitchell-like, her characters cross between novels,Mirella being a case in point.
Jump forward in time again to 2203 to meet Olive, an author resident on the moon, embarking on a book tour on earth, with worrying indications of a new pandemic breaking out. This felt like the core of the book and, for me the most problematic. I have always struggled with Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which has always seemed to me to be a bunch of expensively educated highly successful rock stars moaning about how awful it is to be expensively educated ………. . Or closer to home, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You is a successful author decrying the life of a successful author. There is a similar flavour here.
The final strand of the story, and the one which ties the others together, is again set on the moon, this time in 2403. Gaspery is stuck in dead end jobs, but his sister, Zoey, is a successful scientist working at the mysterious Time Institute. It is Gaspery and Zoey’s story which turn Sea of Tranquility into a knotty little time travel thriller and also presents a fundamental question about the nature of the book. Is this actually a time travel thriller, or is it, like Herve Le Tellier’s “The Anomaly” a novel which postulates that we are living in a simulation. In true post modern fashion, no answer is given, but I have to hope it is the latter, as the former would mean that the ending is unsatisfying, with the author just waving her hands and saying “and it was all just timey-wimey stuff”.
At its best, this is an intricately plotted, entertaining little tale, and the fact that I wanted to know more about Edward and Mirella is testament to the quality of the writing. This is definitely a cut above pulp SF. At times in fact I even smelt a whiff of Paul Auster in the way the stories rub against one another. At its worst, it can be self indulgent, and the plotting, while entertainingly labyrinthine, isn’t always great. For example, at one point one character save’s another’s life. As the reader, I was quite happy about this, but in the context of the book I had no idea of why the saviour risked such dire consequences for so doing. Linked to this, as often in literary SF, the author just gets the basic science wrong. This is a geeky point, but, for example, there is a reference to “mechanicals” keeping the gravity in a city on the moon close to earth normal. As it is clear that the city isn’t spinning, this a an annoying fourth wall breaking piece of nonsense.
In summary, this highly SF literate little book (there are even echoes of Marvel’s Loki) probably deserves three and a half stars.
by Ian Payton
A short and very satisfying story about time travel. It was never Gaspery-Jacques Roberts’ plan to work for the Time Institute, but through a casual combination of circumstances, that’s exactly what he finds himself doing – investigating an anomaly that spans centuries and touches several people’s lives.
What I liked most about this book is the delicate and thoughtful writing of the characters. Emily St. John Mandel has such a light touch with her characters, that each seems to have an authentic emotional presence. I especially liked Olive Llewellyn, whose presence was a gentle foundation for some of the plot.
The plot was intriguing, and well supported by the structure of the book, which pivots around the central chapter, making the second half of the book into a satisfying and drawn out resolution of the first half.
This is a short book that touches on a number of ideas – and for me that left a few things that needed a little more explanation or exploration. And for stalwarts of the time-travel subgenre of science fiction, the reveal at the end won’t come as a particular surprise. These are the only things that prevented me giving a 5-star review. This is the first Emily St. John Mandel book that I’ve read, and I will certainly be putting her others on my to-be-read list.