Sea of Tranquility

Ranging from a small village on Vancouver Island in 1912 to a moon colony centuries later, Sea of Tranquility is a story of time travel and timeless love from the author of Station Eleven. It even features a (minor) character not unlike Emily St. John Mandel herself: an author whose bestselling novel about an imaginary global pandemic turned out to be surprisingly prescient. Sea of Tranquility picks up where The Glass Palace left off, following some of the same characters and storylines, but it also stands completely on its own.

Because Sea of Tranquility is a page-turner of a novel about the lengths that some people will go to save a stranger. Also because life—sometimes terrifyingly, sometimes exhilaratingly—imitates art.

Born in a village on Vancouver Island, Emily St. John Mandel studied dance until she was in her 20s, when she decided to become a writer. She is the author of six novels, including Station Eleven, The Glass Palace, and Sea of Tranquility. A finalist for the National Book Award, Station Eleven won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and became an HBO Max series. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles with her daughter.

Nearly all of her fiction boils down to “the question of what it means to be a decent person in trying times,” says Emily St. John Mandel in this podcast conversation.

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Join us

Emily St. John Mandel will be at Colgate on Thursday, Sept. 14, at 4:30 p.m. EDT for an on-stage conversation and reading. Join us physically in the Persson Hall auditorium or register to join us virtually via Zoom. The in-person audience will be able to participate in a post-reading Q&A and book-signing. Everyone is welcome. Admission is free.

Want to talk about Sea of Tranquility with other thoughtful readers? Join Colgate faculty and students on Monday, Oct. 2, from 7-8 p.m. EDT for a conversation about all three September Living Writers books. (No preparation is necessary; there’s no need to have read all the books in order to participate.) Register here.

Go beyond the book

Sea of Tranquility asks us to “wrestle with the mind-blowing possibility that what is may be entirely different from what we see,” writes Ron Charles in this Washington Post review.
“I didn't just read Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, or Mandel’s latest, Sea of Tranquility. I lived in those novels,” says NPR’s Maureen Corrigan in this NPR review.
“She became famous for a pandemic novel. But the crisis she’s interested in is change itself.” The subtitle of this New Yorker profile of Emily St. John Mandel speaks volumes about her writing and her life.
“I was thinking how the world changes and leaves us a little bit stranded, sometimes, at these points in history,” Mandel told this interviewer from The Guardian.