Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

While no character is the center, there are three who form a sort of main constellation: Edwin St. The novel follows a group of characters from 1912 to 2401, hopscotching through centuries in a deft, sure-handed narrative. In her latest, Sea of Tranquility, Mandel takes her philosophy into outer space and the far reaches of time. Are you prepared to love the stinking homeless person, or the grifter, or strangers on the road in a ruined world as if your life depended on it? This sounds sweet until you think about it for a minute. Survival, she has suggested again and again, may depend more on one’s ability to love than on how well-appointed a fortress one’s bunker is. Material destruction never trumps emotional ties and the life force, no matter how vast and deep that destruction might be. Mandel’s perspective is, in its way, tough-minded.

In The Glass Hotel, a corrupt financier destroys many people’s lives, but empathic connections among them remain even after the worst has happened, stubborn signs of life. In Station Eleven, a pandemic far worse than Covid really does end civilization as we know it, but the few survivors find courage in art and one another, and life goes on. Terrible things happen in her books-worlds end, lives crash, large numbers of people die-but even as Mandel looks at these events without flinching, she also always finds a way to upend our usual takes on them. John Mandel, author of six novels, including the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, which also became an HBO limited series.

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” might be the artistic mantra of Emily St.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel