Plano Reads: Join Second Tuesday Book Club on August 13 for ‘Sea of Tranquility’

Second Tuesday Book Club will meet in person and on Zoom from 7-8pm on Tuesday, August 13, in the public conference room at Schimelpfenig Library, to discuss our eighth book of 2024, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.

Sea of Tranquility follows four different characters through four different times in history and yet, Emily St. John Mandel expertly weaves the time periods together via the characters and events, so that the story is constantly engaging and easy to follow. This is a science fiction novel about time travel that also manages to perfectly capture the concepts of family, art, and our current reality.

Please email Alice McGoldrick at amcgoldrick@plano.gov or Nicole Border at nborder@plano.gov or you may call Schimelpfenig Library at 972-769-4200, if you have questions or comments.

We look forward to seeing you at the library or on Zoom!

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel

Available in Print | eBook | eAudiobook | Large Print | Playaway

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.

– Provided by Publisher

“Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling …Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting—the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction’—to a speculative epic. ” — The New Yorker

“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” — The New York Times

“Bold and exciting…Sea of Tranquility is Ms Mandel’s most ambitious novel yet” — The Economist

“Emily St. John Mandel, who, like an ingenious origami artist, seems determined with each new work to add yet another fold to our perception of what is real and one further twist to what we think of as time…Transcendent.” — The Wall Street Journal

Mandel was born and raised in Canada to her mother who is a social worker and her American father. She was homeschooled until the age of 15 and began The School of Toronto Dance Theatre at age 18 to study contemporary dance. It wasn’t until 5 years later, in 2002 while living in Montreal, did she begin writing her first novel, Last Night in Montreal but it wouldn’t be published until 2009.

Emily St. John Mandel is the author of six novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2022. Her previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama’s list, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages; and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other honors, has been translated into 36 languages, and aired as a limited series on HBO Max. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.