Sea of Tranquility

In 1912, a young man hears violins in a remote Canadian forest; nearly a century later, a teenager has the same disorienting experience under the same tree. Hundreds of years after that, an author walking through an airship terminal suddenly sees trees growing up around her. A century after that, a young man named for a character in the author’s pandemic novel investigates a strange temporal anomaly. The lives of these characters and others intersect in subtle and significant ways throughout this work, which is elevated by the performances of four talented readers. In a nod to the way this refers back to two of Mandel’s previous novels, the cast includes two narrators who read those books. Kirsten Potter, who narrated Station Eleven, is especially well suited to Mandel’s work. Her voice is by turns wry and tender, echoing the elegant way the novel balances moments of everyday beauty with complex philosophical questions and moments of humor.