Sea of Tranquility: A novel

By Emily St. John Mandel

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

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Published Mar 28, 2023

272 pages

Average rating: 7.39

1,052 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

What Bookclubbers are saying about this book

✨ Summarized by Bookclubs AI

Readers say *Sea of Tranquility* is a clever, thought-provoking novel with elegant prose and a complex, multi-century, multi-planetary narrative. Many...

thenextgoodbook
10/10 stars
thenextgoodbook.com

Don't miss this slim dystopian novel by Emily St. john Mandel. Full review on the site.

Sarun
10/10 stars
This book lives rent free in my mind, and it inspired me to reread The Glass Hotel. I love a book written out of order or with multiple narrators whose perspectives we have to balance. St. John Mandel places scenes so familiar to us we can inhabit them inside of fantastic plots that remain with you in scenes as vivid as Toni Morrison’s.
Zoe E.
9/10 stars
A quiet, poignant, meditative book. I'm amazed at what the author accomplishes in under 300 pages. She pulls together deft, evocative of sketches of 4 characters across 4 time periods while also exploring deeper themes including family, purpose and the meaning of reality. I didn't love it quite as much as Station Eleven but I still loved it!
ericaj423
6/10 stars
This was my first Emily St. John Mandel book, and I finished the book with mixed feelings. The story starts in 1912 on Vancouver Island, then jumps to 2020 with an entirely different set of characters and a storyline that feels current, until it jumps again to 2203 and a colony on the moon. The story spans centuries and space. The final twist was satisfying and resolved questions I had been carrying throughout, which I appreciated. But... getting there was rough. Each timeline pulls you in just long enough to get invested before the story shifts again, and the overall lack of action made it difficult for me to stay fully engaged. The slow momentum seems intentional, but it was not for me.
Fonky_Brewster
4/10 stars
A bit of [b:Cloud Atlas|49628|Cloud Atlas|David Mitchell|https:i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1563042852l/49628._SX50_.jpg|1871423], a sprinkle of [b:Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE, Vol. 1|13570|Tsubasa RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE, Vol. 1|CLAMP|https:i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386920662l/13570._SY75_.jpg|15710], and a 1/2 cup of Covid Quarantine Writer's Deadline: it all felt like deja vu.
Ultimately I found it over-hyped and forgettable.

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