Sea of Tranquility Audiobook By Emily St. John Mandel cover art

Sea of Tranquility

A Novel

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Sea of Tranquility

By: Emily St. John Mandel
Narrated by: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter
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About this listen

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.

©2022 Emily St. John Mandel (P)2022 Random House Audio
Fiction Literary Fiction Metaphysical & Visionary Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Time Travel Emotionally Gripping

Critic reviews

WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, Goodreads, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Oprah Daily, LitHub, USA Today, San Francisco Examiner, Glamour, Mother Jones, Esquire, The Millions, TOR.com, The Weather Channel, and Kirkus

CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE • ON PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SUMMER READING LIST

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: TIME, Today.com, Oprah.com, Bloomberg, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Fortune, Glamour, Buzzfeed, Good Housekeeping, Vulture, Bustle, Lit Hub, Medium, Parade, PopSugar, Tech Radar, TOR.com and more

"In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and…project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart…Born of…empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this ‘green-and-blue world’ and who one day might live well beyond." —Laird Hunt, The New York Times

"Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandel’s previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuries…Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling…Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting—the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction’—to a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction." —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

Featured Article: A Bittersweet Symphony: A Station Eleven Explainer


Station Eleven is one of the most successful and popular novels of the 21st century so far. Set in a future North America where a deadly flu wipes out 99% of the population, this post-apocalyptic saga focuses on several survivors as they struggle to find meaning and beauty again. Station Eleven is certainly a different listening experience today, in a pandemic-stricken world, than it was when it was first released, less than a decade ago.

What listeners say about Sea of Tranquility

Highly rated for:

Intricately Woven Plot Compelling Storyline Excellent Narrators Thought-provoking Themes Masterful Storytelling
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Time travel in a contemporary best seller

A narrative that skips through time. It begins on the early 1900s and continues until several hundred years in the future. It follows the life of someone who becomes a time traveler and who struggles with dealing with foreknowledge about people he visits in his past. The idea that time travel is made possible because we live in a simulation sidesteps some of the paradoxes of time travel. But a simulation is a computer program and there is always the risk of file corruption.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Not your typical time travel novel

If you're expecting a Blake Crouch type of time travel adventure, you might want to look elsewhere. This is an "artsier" (sorry, can't think of a better word) version of time travel. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It is extremely well written and narrated story about loneliness and loss. Mandel must have written this during Covid lockdown as it plays a significant part during all of time zones travelled. I will say that for me, the book starts off a bit confusing but comes together beautifully in the end. All in all, a welcome addition to the time travel genre.

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Time Travel

I have to be honest. The story did move slowly at first to me and it took awhile for it to finally tie together. I did think this was a good book, but not for me. However, I could see why others would enjoy it. One thing I did like was the ending felt very smooth and I appreciate that the author made sense of each detail and how it connected.

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Provocative and beautiful

Mandel’s world is eerie and definitely not bound by the present. A detail: the narrator of the 1917 section is the same narrator of barbara Tuchman’s history of WW I. That added to the haunting experience for me.
The details of the future are matter of fact background to the very compelling story.

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Simulated time travel

Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility suggests a time travel story, but in reality, is an investigation into the concept of our reality actually representing a simulation. The story takes place over several disparate time periods from early 20th century through to the early 25th century. Each time period is notable for an apparent 'glitch' that seems to suggest the possibility of our reality being a simulation.

While the story begins vague, it quickly progresses to an ongoing investigation by the Time Institute that works with time travel but is ascertaining the significance of the 'glitch.' During these later portions, the mysteries of the earlier time periods are gradually resolved.

The narration is well done with an excellent choice for multiple narrators. Pacing is smooth for a quick listen.

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Can't Wait For Next TV show

We all loved Station Eleven, and clearly SOT must mist be next to air. Brilliantly written, with waves of overlapping time and storylines, and unknowable plot twists throughout, I loved LoVeD it, and will now be endlessly searching for more by this author. How I kept it all straight just listening to it, was amazing to me, but I think it was her careful prose, with just enough detail that I did not lose the story. But I should probably give credit to the readers as well, for their distinct voices and creating very real characters. But also, I have to admit, I went back and restarted from an earlier point, and a number of details crystallized on the second pass. I didn't need the second pass, but it added some investigative exhilaration to truly connect all the many dots in the story. Thank you Emily St John Mandel, amazing work!!

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An undulating journey

Immersive listen as you jump between characters, with everything culminating for the ending to unveil.

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STAY WITH IT! SUCH A GOOD BOOK!

I may have rolled my eyes and cringed as this started. Then thought, as I organized a room, 'I got nothing else to do' I SO GLAD I STUCK IT OUT! ay listen again, knowing what I know now. Well read, well written and kept the listener guessing! 10 stats really. Again, slow start and phenomenal story.

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Bland "sci-fi"

This book was like ordering a big bowl of hearty chicken noodle soup, and being served bland broth with a few bites of REALLY good chicken in it.

There were some things that felt pretty profound. That's the chicken in it. The bites were tasty enough to bring me to the finish line. I'd say the descriptions of space colony life were pretty cool. The characters felt like real people, too, for the most part. It was interesting, too, how tiny crumbs of seemingly unrelated experiences came together to mean something.

But this experience wasn't great.

I felt this book borrowed too heavily from Cloud Atlas without being nearly as deep. (And if the copied names and tonality were just coincidences, then those were some BIG coincidences)

Some of the characters also jumped to some pretty big conclusions about the nature of our reality based off of pretty limited evicence, missing out on the opportunity to have all kinds of interesting, mystery-inspiring conversations. Thus, I wasn't sold on the premise, which made the read through tedious.

The characters weren't very credible either. One character got a job basically by being annoying. Then, the character was told, "Okay, we'll hire you, but don't do the ONE BAD THING." And then, the FIRST thing the character does is the ONE BAD THING. If there was conflict here, it was lost on me.

Another character represents the future, but, when the character is asked what their idea of the most creative murder is, they reply, "Death by icicle!" which was an internet trope that was relevant a decade ago. If THAT'S still peak novelty 200 years from now--and we also haven't fixed casual misogyny yet--then we have other problems.

The narrators, while talented, were also inconsistent in which charscters they were reading for. I'm not sure if having different performers read for the same character was the original plan, but it made immersion difficult.

If you're looking for a profound sci-fi adventure through time, check out Cloud Atlas. I will try Emily St. John Mendel's other works, because I feel there was potential in Sea of Tranquilty (and maybe, if you haven't read Cloud Atlas, you might have loved this), but I did not enjoy this one.

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Intriguing

I love Emily St John Mandel’s style of writing. I really enjoyed Station 11 and thought I would give this book a try. The subject matter is a little hard to follow at times but the concepts are very intriguing.

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