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 Genre 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: Best of the Year—The 12 Best Sci-Fi Listens of 2022


This year’s sci-fi didn’t shy away from heavy, timely topics like climate change, pandemics, and social justice, but even as the subject matter hit close to home, the listening reached to new heights. Several stunning multicast productions make up this list—as well as narrators we can’t hear enough of. In a world that seems increasingly science fictional by the year, the bar is only set higher for creators in this genre—and this year’s list inches it up a little more.

What listeners say about Sea of Tranquility

Highly rated for:

Intriguing Time-travel Plot Compelling Character Connections Masterful Storytelling Weave Immersive Performances
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Superb

I have enjoyed at least 3 of Mandel's prior novels and this one is maybe the best. I was transfixed. It all comes together toward the end. I rarely write reviews but I have to this time - even the narration is perfect.

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Not My Favorite Sci-Fi!

Too slow. Would not recommend although I
like Science Fiction. Did show the dangers of time travel.

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6 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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It’s getting better all the time

So much better than the underdeveloped, over praised “Station Eleven.” Evidently the author has gotten over her timidity regarding science fiction. It’s not going to leave a mark that won’t wash off, after all. As a result, this new book retains the literary tone and quality for which the author is known while making good use of genre characteristics like broadly convincing world building world building and something akin to plot. Kudos. Maybe the next one will merit five stars

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Fantastic!!

What a book! One of my all time favorite books now. I’ll listen to it again.

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Stay to the end

I love how the story gets wrapped up in the end. Includes characters from the Glass Hotel. A lovely read.

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Cute, but

Some of the writing in this novel feels really flat. I thought the story was okay. I’m glad it was a short read. The market is so saturated with these kinds of stories, that I just wasn’t moved by this book.

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Great story - lacking depth

I did like this book a lot but it’s very short. And the reason it’s that short is because there’s a lack of depth to the narrative that is tangible throughout. Not as much description as other books and the story moves quickly, events and moments happening in a few lines.

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Definitely read The Glass Hotel first

Transporting story with very good narration. Listened to both back to back and things really fell into place (for the most part)

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Great, albeit brief, Sci-fi jaunt

I really have enjoyed Emily St. John Mandel’s work, and this novel is no exception. I only wish there was more! The future world she has built is convincing and intriguing, and I found myself more interested in exploring that future plane than the time travel aspects, though they were also interesting. Mandel’s retrospective on the pandemic, and the introspection of being a pandemic novel author were also very interesting meta view into her experiences. Highly recommend if you like Station 11 and Glass Hotel.

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Mindbender

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and performance, enough that I plan to listen a second time.

The post-apocalyptic time travel and plot elements and characters appearing and reappearing decades or centuries apart is wonderful.

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