SEA OF TRANQUILITY

By Emily St John Mandel, Picador, £14.99 (ebook £8.49)

★★★★☆

Exploring survival in parallel worlds, Sea Of Tranquillity is a sci-fi mystery unfurling across time, through three very different people.

Edwin St Andrew is in newlydiscovered Vancouver Island in 1912, novelist Olive Llewellyn visits Earth on a book tour in 2203, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is a detective born hundreds of years later, yet intricately intertwined in the timeline. Existing centuries apart, they are united by a metaphysical disturbance – a feeling of being in several places at once.

Emily St John Mandel is a master of pandemic apocalypse fiction, and her third novel weaves a panorama of pandemics, moon colonisation and time travel poignantly grounded in life, death, love, loss, and family.