In-Person Event: SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel

Women & Children First is excited to welcome New York Times bestselling author, Emily St. John Mandel for a reading, conversation, and book-signing in honor of the paperback release of Sea of Tranquility. For this event, Mandel will be in conversation with producer and host of the WBEZ podcast Nerdette, Greta Johnsen.

This ticketed event will be held off-site at Chicago Waldorf School (5200 N Ashland Ave). Attendees who choose to purchase a book with their ticket will pick up their copy of Sea of Tranquility at the entrance of the event. Attendees who purchase a ticket for admittance only will receive $5 off their purchase of a book at the event. By purchasing a ticket to this event, you agree that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask during the event.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD • 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.