Cover of Sea of Tranquility

Sea of Tranquility

  • 1999 first published
  • 272 pages
  • β˜… 3.7 (27 ratings)
  • 11 editions

Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility (1999) is a time-travel fiction and adventure fiction novel. It deals with space and time, space colonies, women authors and epidemics.

Open Library readers give it an average of 3.7 out of 5 from 27 ratings, and 159 more have it on their want-to-read list. It has been published in 11 editions. It appeared on the New York Times Combined Print And E-Book Fiction bestseller list in 2022.

At about 272 pages, most readers finish it in 4–5 hours.

About 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 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.
Description from Open Library

Awards & lists

  • ✦Locus Awards 2023 β€” Best Science Fiction Novel (nominee)
  • πŸ“°New York Times bestseller list β€” Combined Print And E-Book Fiction, 2022

Themes, setting & tropes

Genres

Subjects

  • Space and time
  • Space colonies
  • Women authors
  • Epidemics
  • Colonies spatiales
  • Romans, nouvelles
  • Γ‰crivaines
  • Time travel
  • Apocalyptic & post-apocalyptic science fiction
  • Action & adventure science fiction

Quick answers

Who wrote Sea of Tranquility?

Sea of Tranquility was written by Emily St. John Mandel and first published in 1999.

What genre is Sea of Tranquility?

It is usually shelved as Time Travel and Adventure.

How long is Sea of Tranquility?

The median edition has 272 pages, about 4–5 hours of reading at 250 words per minute.

What books are similar to Sea of Tranquility?

Readers who like it often enjoy Deathlands, Pebble in the Sky and The Time Traders.

More by Emily St. John Mandel

All books β†’
  • Cover of Station Eleven

    Station Eleven

    Emily St. John Mandel

    2014β˜… 4.1

Books like Sea of Tranquility