The Sea of Tranquillity

One snowy night, Arthur Lander, a famous Hollywood actor, suffers a heart attack on stage during a performance of King Lear. Jivan Shondri, a young paparazzo studying nursing, is in the audience and rushes to help, under the gaze of an eight-year-old actress, Kirsten Raymond. But despite his efforts, Arthur ends up dead. As Jivan makes his way home through snow-covered Toronto, he learns that a deadly flu has broken out and is spreading rapidly. He decides to barricade himself in his brother’s flat, in a skyscraper, from where he watches the world as he knew it crumble. Twenty years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Wandering Symphony, a troupe of actors and musicians who travel to the settlements of the now-changed world, performing Shakespeare and playing music. Their lives are a daily struggle for survival, as their memories painfully intertwine with their new reality, whilst evil may lurk everywhere. Station Eleven is a haunting dystopian novel, dark and elegiac yet at the same time radiant and hopeful. A novel about art, nostalgia, the people who leave their mark on us, and the beauty of the world around us.

Vincent works at the Kayet Hotel, a five-star palace of glass and cedar, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. On the night she meets Jonathan Alcaitis, a threatening message appears on the hotel’s glass façade: ‘Be careful not to swallow any broken glass. At the same time in Manhattan, Alcaítis is enjoying the profits of a well-orchestrated investment scam, transferring non-existent sums of money between his clients’ accounts. When the scheme collapses, wiping out fortunes and destroying lives, Vincent—who was posing as his wife—vanishes into the night. Years later, one of the victims of Alcaitis’s fraud is hired to investigate the strange disappearance of a woman from the deck of a ship. In this gripping tale of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel sheds light on unseen facets of a mosaic made up of homeless shelters, underground clubs, international shipping, luxury hotel amenities, and life in a federal prison. Behind its unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel conceals greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and uncontrollable consequences; the countless ways in which one might seek the meaning of life.

In 1912, Edwin St Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic Ocean by steamship. As he enters the forest, in the wild wilderness of British Columbia, he is spellbound... In a moment of total darkness, like an eclipse, he hears the notes of a violin echoing from an airship station – an experience that deeply moves him. Two centuries later, in 2203, the famous author Olive Llewellyn is on a tour to promote her book. She travels across Earth, far from her home on the second lunar colony – unaware of a pandemic that is unfolding. In her most widely read book, a strange scene appears: a man plays the violin, its sound echoing through the concourse of an airship station, whilst the trees of the forest rise all around him. Almost two hundred years later, in 2401, Gaspari Roberts, a hotel concierge in the City of Night, is called upon to travel back in time to investigate the strange coincidence of the two events, capable of disrupting the timeline of the Universe. Against the backdrop of a new pandemic, Emily St. John Mandel creates a compelling dystopia across parallel universes, balancing the deeply human with the dark. A novel that explores humanity’s anxiety in the face of the unknown future that looms ahead.