272 pages
Published April 2022 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review
Publisher's Summary:
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
My Thoughts:
This week's theme is time travel, something I'm not usually all that found of in a book. But here we're talking about Emily St. John Mandel; and if you've been here long, you'll know that I'm a huge fan. This is the fifth of Manel's books I've read; my first was her first, Last Night In Montreal, that I read before I started blogging. Everyone of them is an entirely unique story, filled with entirely unique characters, and it's been a pleasure to watch her hone her skills and expand her storytelling.
Here, in her first foray into speculative fiction, Mandel plays with a number of time periods (most of them set in the future), time travel, lunar colonies, and the idea that we might all just be living in a simulation. I love the way she is, more and more, so cleverly and successfully dropping characters and ideas from her prior novels into her current works and not making it feel forced at all but new-to-Mandel readers will not be lost without having read the prior books.
Once again, I'm happy not to have read the synopsis before starting the book. I was completely taken by surprise when the focus of the story moved away from Edwin St. Andrew and jumped to a new time period. Even if I had read the synopsis, though, I just would have been surprised again and again as things began to tie together. And those last thirty or so pages? Completely did not see what was coming!
I urge you to add this to your tbr and then forget what it's about completely. Mandel is a superb storyteller and you do not want that spoiled by preconceived ideas. Do not read the synopsis when you finally pick it up. Let the surprises unfold.
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