Tomas Hachard

Emily St. John Mandel’s novels often feature a moment of disorientation — a brief shift in point of view from the third to the first person, for instance, or a quick jump in time — that unsettles a stable reality and leaves the reader suddenly adrift. Her latest work, the layered and dazzling Sea of Tranquility…

We pick up the story of Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel near the end. The year is 2018, and Vincent, a woman who lives a nomadic life on a shipping freighter, has gone overboard, “plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness.” She will form the central thread through this wandering narrative that wears its flightiness on its…