Sea of Tranquility also exists to play, metatextually, with what it was like to be Emily St. The results are lovely, life-affirming, and occasionally but unmistakably clumsy. It exists to try to grapple with the world the Covid-19 pandemic made and what the pandemic taught us about reality. Mandel’s latest book, Sea of Tranquility, is a true pandemic novel. Station Eleven wasn’t really about its pandemic, though that was just the plot engine that got Mandel to her artsy post-apocalyptic world of traveling Shakespeare companies, beautifully rendered in the recent HBO Max TV adaptation. Which meant that in 2020, she acquired a peculiar sort of status as one of the ones who saw it coming, somehow what Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson called one of the plague prophets. John Mandel published Station Eleven, her bestselling novel about a pandemic.
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