SEA OF TRANQUILITY

Time and time again

- Jonathan Wright

RELEASED 28 APRIL

5/5

272 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Emily St John Mandel Publisher Picador

In so far as it has ended, there was a strange quality to the conclusion of the coronavirus pandemic. In the UK, for all that Boris Johnson proclaimed a “freedom day” in July 2021, the pandemic has almost seemed to peter out, as Covid-19 has became endemic among a population protected by vaccines.

And yet there’s an underlying sense of the pandemic being unfinished business. There are the lives that will never revert to previous patterns. There are the friends and relatives whom we didn’t mourn properly. There’s the sense of looking back to days that seemed impossibly vivid at the time, but where it’s now puzzlingly difficult to recall what happened when. Looking ahead, real life, whatever that may turn out to be, has in key respects yet to begin again – or perhaps we’re fearful that real life will turn out to be a procession of new variants, stagflation, wars and climate change biting.

All this is worth mentioning because there are books where the adage that all science fiction is about the era in which it’s created seems especially apt – rarely more so than in the case of Sea Of Tranquility. This is a lucid dream of a book, one that features a pandemic, and even a successful author in Olive Llewellyn who – as St John Mandel did with the Clarke Award-winning Station Eleven – has previously written about a fictional pandemic. Whether by accident or design (probably a combination of both) it squarely occupies the emotional territory of early 2022.