Giant leaps

Emily St John Mandel’s highly anticipated new novel jumps skilfully across time and space to ask the big questions about where humanity might be heading.

- ELISABETH EASTHER

SEA OF TRANQUILITY, by Emily St John Mandel (Picador, $35)

“So I’m guessing I’m not the first to ask you what it’s like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic?”

The question is asked of Olive, one of the protagonists in Sea of Tranquility and the author of the bestselling Marienbad. The book is all about a pandemic and Olive is on a publicity tour of Earth in the year 2203, from her home in one of the colonies on the Moon. As Olive travels to talk about her book, she is subjected to outrageous questions from journalists, while taxi drivers tell her their ideas for novels and devoted readers turn up with tattoos of text from her books inked on their bodies. It’s easy to imagine that much of Olive’s storyline was drawn from the Canadian author Emily St John Mandel’s own experiences following the runaway success of the fantastically prescient and bestselling 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven, recently released as a television series.