Emily St. John Mandel is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Station Eleven (2014) and The Glass Hotel (2020). Her most recent book, 2022’s Sea of Tranquility, was considered one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, NPR, and the Goodreads Choice Awards. The Iron Book Discussion Group will read and discuss this time travel story in September 2026…
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
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.
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Copies of Sea of Tranquility can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s also available to download through Overdrive/Libby as an ebook and an audiobook.
An in-person discussion of Sea of Tranquility will be held at the library on Tuesday, September 8, at 6:00 PM. No registration is required, so please join us if you’d like to be part of the discussion.
Published on August 10, 2026.
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