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Sea of Tranquility: A novel

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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290 pages

Average rating: 7.39

831 RATINGS

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25 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

ediehas
Feb 28, 2025
4/10 stars
i think my issue with mandel's books is that the characters feel so hollow. mostly just enjoyed the first chunk of the novel with the first character from 1912, the only one i felt any depth to. conceptually this was an interesting sci-fi/dystopian type novel, as are her other books, but aside from the creativity of the story, it's just difficult for me to engage with the stakes of most of her characters, here and in her other books.
ellengryphon
Feb 22, 2025
10/10 stars
Anneke
Anonymous
Jan 11, 2025
8/10 stars
disclaimer: never read any of the author’s other books, which are apparently referenced in this one

hey this was a fun read! I didn’t have many expectations going into it, and it pleasantly surprised me. there’s a progressive reveal that I think is done well, elements of sci-fi, humor, varied characters that feel quite real… at one point the mc does something that seems out of character but other than that it was good. the multiple perspectives works very well

someone else compared it to cloud atlas which is a book I loved and a comparison I made as well while reading. however I thought the goals of each book were pretty different, and they’re mostly just similar in the (unique) narrative structure they use.

it seems like some other reviews are getting hung up because this is part of a series (which I didn’t know!) and/or they expected this to be deep and meaningful and life changing or have really good world building. I didn’t have expectations of it at all so maybe that’s why none of this stuff bothered me. if you just want an interesting and funny book that has a message but isn’t too philosophical, I would definitely recommend :)

rating: 4 stars
Sarun
Jan 11, 2025
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.
ChrisPaquette
Dec 20, 2024
8/10 stars
A little matrix. A little butterfly effect. A little historical fiction. A little pandemic. A little cloud atlas. A little cheese.

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