By Emily St. John Mandel
I read this in a single day - the 2nd of December 2023, while in India.
It’s a book similar to Cloud Atlas, with interweaving plotlines through four centuries, all connected by a single moment in an airship terminal where time glitches and links a few strangers. Emily St John Mandel is quickly becoming one of my favourite writers, in a league with Becky Chambers and Erin Morgenstern. Her prose is lucid, crystal clear, and so so beautiful. She writes hauntingly and with such perspicacity of character and emotion.
I thought it was also a very meta book, particularly the sequences with Olive, an author who is on a book tour, newly famous due to a book about a pandemic, when a pandemic breaks out in real life, and who is thinking of writing an entirely different sci fi book in order to escape her life during lockdown. This was written with COVID in mind, and it’s all the better for the sheer weight of experience and anecdote the autoreferentiality brings.
The plot is also remarkably well crafted, with connections and serendipity everywhere, although not to the extent it was present in Station Eleven, where Arthur Leander and his supporting cast twirled around each other like the most fantastic orrery.
I found the plotline in 1912, with the remittance man, to be one of the most evocative pieces of writing I’ve ever read about the wilderness and - there’s no other word, the blueness - of Canada. Mandel is a Canadian through and through.
I cried at the end.