Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is one of my favourite novels. It has been adapted into an excellent TV miniseries on HBO. It was published in 2014 and is about a pandemic (I think Emily St. John Mandel must be a bit prescient) that wipes out over ninety percent of Earth’s population, and how what is left of humanity lives on fifteen years after the pandemic. I enjoyed Sea of Tranquility almost as much as I enjoyed reading Station Eleven. Written during the COVID pandemic, Sea of Tranquility also features a pandemic, but the pandemic does not take centre stage. I would not classify Sea of Tranquility as dystopian or science fiction, even though part of the novel is set in the future when humans have colonized the moon and outer space; rather, it is a novel whose focus is on human nature and human relationships.

Sea of Tranquility opens in the year 1912 and follows Edwin St. John St. Andrew as he is exiled from his ancestral home in England and sent to live in Canada. Edwin ends up on the west coast at the settlement of Caiette, where he one day walks into the forest to the base of a giant maple tree, and then everything goes dark, and he hears the sound of a violin playing and another sound he does not recognize.

Then the novel jumps to 2020 (right before the start of the COVID pandemic) when Mirella Kessler goes to see a performance by the composer Paul Smith, which includes a video recording by his sister, Vincent Smith, of her walking up to an old maple tree, and then the screen goes black and the sound of a violin playing and a “whoosh” noise can be heard (Mirella, Paul and Vincent are all characters from Emily St. John Mandel’s novel The Glass Hotel, which was published between Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility).

After 2020, the novel jumps to 2203 and follows writer Olive Llewellyn, who was born on the moon, as she goes on a book tour around Earth at a time when a strange new virus has appeared. Olive has written a bestselling book about a pandemic which includes a passage about a man playing a violin in an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise up around him (I got the impression that Olive and her pandemic novel are a stand-in for Emily St. John Mandel and Station Eleven, and that St. John Mandel is commenting on some of the criticism she received for her own novel). The final timeline in Sea of Tranquility is 2401 when people have learned to time travel, and it follows Gaspery Roberts as he investigates the strange anomaly that each of Edwin, Vincent and Olive have seen.

This is all that I am going to tell you about Sea of Tranquility as I think you should experience it for yourself. I found it to be a fascinating novel with a satisfying and easy to understand conclusion. If you have not read Emily St. John Mandel’s novels, I highly recommend you read both Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility.