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Staff Pick of the Week: “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel

Genre: Science Fiction, Parallel Narratives

Read-Alikes:
Lost in Time by A. G. Riddle
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

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.

For questions about putting this or any other book on hold, please leave a comment below or call the reference desk at 732-873-8700 opt. 3.

Thanks for reading,
George, FTPL

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