A Night in with
Emily St. John Mandel
Join bestselling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel as she celebrates the paperback publication of her new book Sea of Tranquillity.
In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later Olive Llewelyn, a famous writer, is traveling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling 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 time, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat 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.
Sea of Tranquillity is a profound and compelling novel about art, time, love and plague. In conversation for this unique virtual event, Emily will discuss the landscapes in the novel, from Vancover Island in 1912 to a dark colony of the moon, she will grapple with the complexities of parallel worlds and time. This promises to be an other-worldly event, be sure not to miss it.
“One of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into speculative fiction yet” New York Times
“A time travel epic: a soaring story of connections through the ages . . . profound and life-affirming” Vogue