Sea of Tranquility

In 1912, Edwin St. Andrew, exiled from England to the Canadian wilderness after a dinner-party outburst, experiences a strange, disorienting moment in the forest — a rush of darkness and the sound of a violin that shouldn't be there. Two centuries later, novelist Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour on Earth, far from her home on a moon colony, promoting a bestseller about a pandemic just as a real one begins to spread.

In 2401, detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is hired to investigate reports of an identical anomaly recurring across centuries, a case that leads him to Edwin, to Olive, and to a childhood friend from his own moon-colony neighborhood — and toward a decision about whether, and how, to intervene in what he finds.

Sea of Tranquility is a slim, deliberately paced novel that treats time travel less as an action premise than a way of asking what continuity and simulation mean across centuries. Mandel folds in a few quiet callbacks to Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, but the book stands on its own and doesn't require having read either.