Reviews

1960s London. Driven by deep suspicion of the charlatan psychiatrist her sister frequented before her suicide, a young woman decides to visit him herself, under the guise of an alter ego. The psychiatrist in question, Collins Braithwaite, is a notorious celebrity quack, famed for his unconventional methods. In seeking the truth, she finds that even the nature of truth is uncertain

Thematically, Sea of Tranquility is a fairly standard time travel mystery, offering three distinct timelines, linked by a fourth. In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. John. St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic to the new world, adrift and uncertain of much at all. In 2020, Mirella Kessler mourns her friend Vincent Alkatis Smith (both of these characters also appear in Mandel’s earlier novel The Glass House) and tries to make sense of the circumstances around her death.