Sea of Tranquility

'Cause what is...

Or Sea of Tranquility, but better than the others, which is still-

Pretty darn good

... a, a very, very high watermark.

All right, my second pick is called Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.

It comes out September 15th, and she is the author of the previous books Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility.

And this one takes place in the year 2031.

America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks, there is some hope.

It's not on my

list,

but I did read Sea of Tranquility, which I really enjoyed.

I feel like I might

The Reading Pathway is guiding us toward the ultimate narrative convergence now.

Sea of Tranquility.

The Book Riot guide explicitly notes that they normally try to cap these Reading Pathway posts at just three essential titles.

To add a fourth is really rare for them, but the deep structural interconnectedness of Mandel's work made a fourth pick an absolute requirement for understanding the universe.

Y- You simply cannot grasp the full scale of the metropolis without navigating this specific coordinate.

It's the linchpin.

Published in 2022, Sea of Tranquility acts as the perfect required bridge to her newest 2026 book, Exit Party, and the pure scope of this novel is staggering.

It's massive.

She had written Station Eleven, which was the first book I read of hers.

She wrote a kind of a sequel to this called The Sea of Tranquility, and she's got a new one out right now called Exit Party that came out two weeks ago that is an absolute banger.

Uh, might be one of m- might, might have surpassed The Glass Hotel for my favorite, uh, in the Mandel-verse, as, if you will.

And we, we wanna get Emily St. John Mandel on the show at some point.

It helps.

"Rank the Emily St. John Mandel books.

I think it's Sea of Tranquility and Singer's Gun at the top for me." You know, this is a tough one for me now.

I would've said before I reread this book that it was Glass Hotel, Station, Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility.

I am so excited about today's author interview.

Our guest is the author of six previous novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2022.

Her other novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama's list, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages.

And Station Eleven, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other honors.

Okay, so bits of your own life are also worked into the books.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, I had a real giggle when I was reading Sea of Tranquility, when Olive, you know, tours the moon colonies during the pandemic, and she gets asked in these, you know, book events, these really annoying, stupid questions, and a lot of people come about the profits in the pandemic book.

And having, you know, been on tour multiple times myself, I know the kind of insane questions that you will sometimes be asked.

Our guest today is Emily St. John Mandel, a writer whose work experiments with literary noir, speculative fiction, and horror.

Her best-selling books include The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, and her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven was adapted into a limited series for HBO.

On September 18th, 2026, on the occasion of her newest novel, Exit Party, Mandel came to the Sidney Goldstein Theater to talk to Daniel Hamler, the author of numerous books for all ages, sometimes under the pen name Lemony Snicket.

Join us now for a conversation with Emily St. John Mandel.

My first three books were literary fiction and also detective fiction.

Station Eleven is literary fiction and also sci-fi.

Sea of Tranquility was like literary fiction, speculative fiction, historical fiction, auto fiction.

It was a time-traveling detective.

Hannah McGill, it's the seventh novel.

Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility, Glass Hotel have earned her legions of fans.

And she's known for setting her stories in the near future, combining these apocalyptic plots with human dilemmas.

And is that the trick? Although she creates this kind of labyrinthine world, she wants you to invest heavily in individual characters.