Sea of Tranquility: A novel

· Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, and Kirsten Potter
4.5
22 reviews
Audiobook
5 hr 47 min
Unabridged
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More
Want a 10 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline. 
Add

About this audiobook

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.

Ratings and reviews

4.5
22 reviews
Greger Wikstrand
October 24, 2022
Very interesting plot, well executed. Wondering how long the COVID references will feel relevant‽
Did you find this helpful?
Galaxie Bettie
November 8, 2022
an eerily serene story about the complications of time travel.
Did you find this helpful?

About the author

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL’s five previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which has been translated into twenty-five languages, and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, was the basis of a limited series on HBO Max, and has been translated into thirty-seven languages. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at [email protected] or visit prhspeakers.com

Rate this audiobook

Tell us what you think.

Listening information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

Listeners also liked

More by Emily St. John Mandel

Similar audiobooks