NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, 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. One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads “One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times 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.

We all agreed on two things about Mandel's latest novel. First, Mandel is a very good writer with a keen sense of observation and terrific style. Second, the time-travel plot is this book is stupid, poorly executed, and devoid of interest. How we felt about the book, and how you will feel about it, completely depends on how much weight you put in each of these two things. On the positive side, Mandel starts the book with a terrific view into the life of ethically rebellious idle gentleman Edwin St. Andrew as he's exiled from his family for his radical thoughts about India (they don't like colonizers) and then drifting around Canada looking for purpose. The book also does a good job with Olive, the author stand-in, as she goes on a disorienting book tour as a pandemic unknowingly rises around her. The dialogue and the character perspectives in these scenes are fresh and insightful and fun. Most of us enjoyed reading these things and as a result breezed through the book. But on the down side, the entire book is centered around an occurrence in Mandel's last novel, The Glass Hotel, where the protagonist blacks out of a moment in the woods of Western Canada and has a strange audio hallucination. Mandel seems to think this is a hook, but if you're like us, you either didn't even remember that happened in the previous book or didn't think it mattered in any way to that story and thus didn't find it a compelling starting place. The novel spins this out into a vision of time-travel and a meditation on questions of whether the world is a simulation, but all of that stuff is just honestly lazy world design. The core paradox in the novel is basically just a 101 thought of time-travel conflicts and the motivations of the time-travelers (from, I swear I'm not making this up, the Time Institute) are just simplistic and nonsensical. This might not matter except that the center of the book is about the guy doing the time-travelling and so we're forced to follow his story as he chases a mystery that we don't care about and makes ethical decisions that don't add up. If you actually are going to change time for a pandemic, do you do it to secretly save just one personal of the literal hundreds you see? And if you've had five years of training in time travel, haven't you learned this is all just butterfly-effect stuff and any change you make is just going to cause tons of unforeseen consequences? Melanie wisely suggested that the point of the book was about pandemics and human nature, citing references to disease in each timeline and how the world seems to be always on the verge of ending, but we all felt that theme didn't land properly. We didn't really get an emotional power out of Olive's pre-pandemic world that we thought we should, especially given that we just went through this ourselves with COVID and Mandel did such a good job with the horrors of disease in Station Eleven. Given the flaccidness of that theme, there just wasn't anything going on plot wise that we cared about. So where that left us is split. If you could ignore the plot and just focus on the secondary characters and dialog, the book had some great stuff in it. Some people left our conversation ready to read anything Mandel writes from this point forward. If you couldn't ignore the plot, you had no idea why this book was written, and just wish Mandel could have found a way to tell a story of different times without such an obvious and ham-fisted time-travel narrative holding it together. We like Mandel as a writer, but I think everyone in NUBClub would tell you to skip this book and look at her other work, because at least then you won't have to stomach so much bad sci-fi.