Next month, Mandel will share the stage with authors including Colson Whitehead, Sandra Cisneros, Margaret Atwood, and George RR Martin at the inaugural Santa Fe literary festival. “Sometimes the geography is very compelling with these invitations,” she says, smiling. Mercifully, her next destination, Santa Fe, is a little closer to home. It sent Mandel on an international book tour: seven countries in 14 months, some details of which she mined for her new book Sea of Tranquillity, a trippy sci-fi novel whose time-travelling plot hopping between 20th-century Canada and a colony on the moon defies any blurb. It was translated into 35 languages and adapted into a brilliant HBO series last year. The book sold more than one-and-a-half million copies and earned its writer the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of 2015.
But she couldn’t bring herself to watch it.Įven before she was labelled a “prophet” of coronavirus (a label the author still bristles at), Station Eleven was a hit. Mandel, herself, downloaded the 2011 film Contagion. “We have this impossible desire to know how an unfolding disaster will end,” says the author over Zoom. Mandel’s 2014 novel about a world-annihilating virus found unlikely popularity amid Covid-19. Her stories of deadly pandemics and financial collapse offer warmth – like the heat coming off a forest fire. There is something comforting about Emily St John Mandel’s writing. Emily St John Mandel is poised to release her sixth novel, a time-travelling saga that features another pandemic (JiaHao Peng)
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