So while the protagonist, Olive Llewellyn, is an author whose book tour is disrupted when a global pandemic, “Sars Twelve”, breaks out, the year is 2203 and all major cities in what was once the United States exist under climate-controlled domes. Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, revisits aspects of her pandemic experience, although as one might imagine from a writer interested in building alternative worlds, not in a conventional style. The novel itself, meanwhile, went from being simply a hit to the kind of book from which fans lift lines to have tattooed on their arms.Īll of this, while alarming the author, also struck her as interesting at the narrative level. Instead, Mandel was feted as clairvoyant, asked to predict what might happen next, and invited, she says now, to “treat the pandemic as a way to sell copies of Station Eleven”. Nobody wanted to talk about The Glass Hotel. It was a weird time for everyone, but for the 42-year-old novelist, whose previous book, Station Eleven, had imagined a post-apocalyptic world 20 years after a deadly pandemic killed 99% of the population, it was particularly strange. T wo years ago, Emily St John Mandel was promoting The Glass Hotel, her fifth novel, when the pandemic broke out and the world shut down.
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