Edwin St. Andrewis 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 terminalan experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellynis on a book tour. Shes traveling all over Earth, but her home isthe second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olives 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.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful,Sea of Tranquilityis a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.