Emily St. John Mandel’s “Sea of Tranquillity” is not as simple as its title or its length might suggest. And yet this part sci-fi, part pandemic anxiety, part historical fiction, part autofiction novel carries itself with a simple elegance. The multi-temporal narrative shifts smoothly between various characters’ encounters with a space-time anomaly. A young Englishman first encounters the glitch in 1912 while walking in the Canadian wilderness. Almost three-hundred-years later a famed author very similar to Mandel herself, except that she is from the moon's second colony, also encounters the anomaly as she struggles to complete a book tour under threat from a new pandemic. And one hundred years after that, in the 25thCentury, a Time Institute agent is sent back in time to investigate. This might all sound a bit too complicated if it wasn’t so clear that whatever force is tearing time apart is also bringing these disparate characters together, and you won’t put the book down until you find out why.
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