Sea of Tranquility (novel)

The novel is named after the Mare Tranquillitatis, a lunar mare. In the novel, the lunar mare is the site of the first extraterrestrial human colony. == Plot ==

Edwin (1912) In 1912, Edwin St. John St. Andrew, youngest grandson of an English earl, scandalizes his father at a dinner party by criticizing the British Raj, and is exiled to Canada as a remittance man. Edwin travels to Caiette, a fictional settlement (which also appeared in Mandel's previous novel The Glass Hotel) on the sparsely inhabited Vancouver Island. Venturing into a forest, Edwin suddenly finds himself within a vast, dark space, hearing a violin and other sounds he cannot recognize. The experience lasts only a few seconds. A stranger named Roberts, claiming to be a priest (but is in fact the same time traveler introduced later in the novel), questions him about this experience, but flees when Edwin becomes suspicious. Returning to the Time Institute, Gaspery-Jacques is arrested alongside Zoey, but he does not regret his actions even upon learning that Edwin's ultimate death from the Spanish flu remains unchanged. Decades later, having learned the violin and moved to Oklahoma City, Alan plays at the Airship Terminal on the destined day, seeing reality corrupt and repair itself as Edwin, Vincent, Olive, and his past selves all appear before him. ==Themes and influences==

The character of Edwin is loosely based on one of Mandel's great-grandfathers. Many reviewers (Ron Charles, Yvonne C. Garrett, Laird Hunt, Bethanne Patrick and Marcel Theroux) have remarked on the similarities between Olive and Mandel: Like Mandel's Station Eleven, Olive has written a book about a fictional pandemic before an actual pandemic happened. Laird Hunt calls Olive "unquestionably a stand-in for Mandel herself". Garrett has argued in her review of Sea of Tranquility, that Mandel − through the eyes of Olive − has detailed her own experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred during the writing of the novel.' An example of this is a sentence detailing the human experience of the pandemic: "the panic, the lockdown, the constant sirens, technology exhaustion, the shifting and rethinking of personal and career priorities."' == Reception ==

Reviews Yvonne C. Garrett has called Sea of Tranquility in The Brooklyn Rail "beautifully written" being an "equal parts vast and intimate, quiet and thrilling contemplation on humanity, physics, time, and what it means to be alive." Bethanne Patrick saw "a novel that is pure pleasure to read." In the Los Angeles Times she argued that Mandel is a superb stylist – "you see the strands and later the beautiful results, but your eyes simply cannot follow what comes in between." Writing in the Financial Times, Christian Lorentzen sees the work in a clearly negative light: He argued that "Sea of Tranquility is a book where every new element subtracts from the reader's experience. The characters are simplistic, the dialogue flat, and the descriptive passages exercise either in gauzy wonder at nature or dreary despair about the dehumanised technoscape. A book like Sea of Tranquility is a sign of a genre's exhaustion." In the Washington Independent Review of Books, Andrea M. Pawley has remarked on the similarities between the novel and Last Year at Marienbad, a 1961 avant-garde French film, and stated that "the work informed St. John Mandel's writing of this novel". Accolades In 2022, the book was listed on Barack Obama's annual summer reading list and named as one of his favorite books of the year. The novel was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was picked by Stephen Bush as one of the Financial Times critics’ picks for best books of 2022. Furthermore, it was one of Amazon's 20 Best Books of the Year for 2022. The novel won the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Science Fiction 2022. == Adaptation ==

In April 2022, it was announced that HBO Max will adapt the novel and The Glass Hotel into television series, each produced by Paramount Television Studios with Mandel and Patrick Somerville co-writing. ==References==