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.

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.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

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Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel was a book that kept popping up on my Twitter feed with lots of comments about how amazing it was and how it was a must-read. Normally, I tend to give these a wide berth unless the book is already in my sights. There was something about it that kept drawing me in, and so I decided to give it a try.

I was surprised to find I liked Sea of Tranquillity more than I expected. It is a short science fiction novel that is intricately woven together and has a very clever ending. However, I am not as overly enamoured with it as some people seem to be. It was an interesting read, but I would not say it is amazing or as groundbreaking as the critics are calling it. As someone who has studied science fiction at university (and by that I mean theory and literature that makes your brain hurt), I actually found the sci-fi elements of it to be quite basic and oversimplified. The ideas proposed in the book that were being investigated were never fully realised, and were just left there to hang as a possibility. Nothing was ever fully proven.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of St. John Mandel’s writing either, to be honest. When a book begins with a character with a similar name to the author (St. John St. Andrew), it doesn’t leave a good impression on me. Even less so when they are described as “hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic”. While the author doesn’t have a double-sainted name, she does have a double-barreled name and has used her own name for the character. 

The second character we’re introduced to is a female author with a husband and a daughter who is away from home on a book tour in 2203. Later in the book, she struggles through a pandemic with her family. Again, I found it difficult to ignore the similarities between this character and St. John Mandel, who is a female author with a husband, a daughter, has written crime novels, and has just lived through a pandemic. This character felt a bit too Mary Sue for my liking. While there were useful insights into things that female authors have to deal with (there’s a scene with a crime interview, for example), I felt that the character could have been better written.

There’s also the huge issue of book tours in 2203 being near enough exactly the same as they are now in 2022. Sea of Tranquillity is a novel about time travel, and yet it fails to take into consideration how society has changed. It contains all the stereotypical science fiction beliefs of the future, such as humans living on the moon, but the everyday life of both futuristic periods reads exactly like a normal day in 2202. If you asked your grandparents or even your parents what a normal day looked like to them, it would differ from our normal day. Even in my lifetime, it’s changed a lot; the Internet, for one thing, didn’t exist when I was growing up. Even just in the last few years, let alone the last few decades, the book community has changed a lot (booktoks and bookstagrams never existed), so the idea that book tours exist in 181 years (if they even exist at all) is highly unlikely.

This is one of those books where I feel that the author’s name has more weight than the actual contents of the book. As I said, it’s an interesting read and has a clever ending after all the pieces have been put together. I also found it interesting that some of the side characters link to other books that St. John Mandel has written. She has clearly put a lot of thought into the web she’s woven. Sea of Tranquillity just didn’t hit the mark for me.

Thank you for reading my book review for Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel.

What was the last book about time travel that you read?

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