Sea of Tranquility

　　這是本傳遞靈魂溫度的科幻小說
　　時間軸度橫跨五百年，地理位置從溫哥華島到虛構的未來月球移民基地
　　唯一不變的是人性
 
　　貴族家庭出身的Edwin St. Andrew因一次在晚宴上出言不遜的行為，被家族流放到了大西洋對岸的溫哥華島，他孤身一人乘坐在蒸汽船上，那年，Edwin才18歲。當他被加拿大蓊鬱的綠意森林吸引，決定在這個名為Caiette的小鎮郊區散散步。走著走著，意外聽到悠揚的小提琴聲，循聲而訪，在他眼前展開的，將是一段畢生難忘的經歷⋯⋯
 
　　1994年，一位名叫Vincent的少女，在家附近無意錄下了一段影片。當她過世後，作曲家哥哥在2020一場音樂會上，公開播放了這段影片：Vincent走在Caiette小鎮的郊區，突然畫面全黑，唯能聽見喇巴中傳出斷斷續續的小提琴音，和嘈雜的人聲。200年後，已移居到月球上的作家Olive，決定要回到地球上展開巡迴簽書會，在書裡，有一段文字是這麼描述的：一個男人在飛行船轉運站中拉著小提琴，彷彿他就站在森林中央。
 
　　接著又跳了200年，地球人口因數量爆炸，月球上的殖民基地已經增加到三個之多。其中一位來自暗夜城殖民地的警探－Gaspery-Jacques Roberts，奉命調查在地球北美洲中，發生的一些神秘事件⋯⋯(文／博客來外文館)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

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

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.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL’s five previous novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, has been translated into thirty-two languages, and is the basis for the HBO Max series by the same name. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.