![]() ![]() ![]() You find yourself, sometimes, wanting the more robust underpinnings of her previous novels. Highly readable, quite short and told in Mandel’s customary delightful style, it’s full of compelling ideas – space colonisation and time travel, for example, and the simulation hypothesis (which is what it sounds like, that we’re living in a computerised simulation: some astrophysicists, as well as Elon Musk, apparently believe it’s feasible) – but addresses them too cursorily. And several characters – Vincent, Mirella, and Jonathan Alkaitis, the Madoff-style Ponzi-scheme villain of the previous novel – all rear their heads, some of them, like Alkaitis, living in the alternative timelines posited in The Glass Hotel (he’s not in prison, he’s in a hotel in Dubai). In Sea of Tranquility, named after the "silent flatlands" on the moon where the Apollo astronauts landed, the small settlement of Caiette on Vancouver Island is a crucial reference point from The Glass Hotel. ![]()
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