Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew crosses the Atlantic, exiled from English polite society. In British Columbia, he enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. The experience shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later, Olive Llewellyn, a famous writer, is travelling all over Earth, far away from her home in the second moon colony. Within the text of Olive's bestselling 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 time, he uncovered a series of lives upended: the son of an English aristocrat 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.

Perceptive, poignant, and incredibly compelling, Sea of Tranquillity is a virtuoso performance: a novel that investigates the idea of parallel worlds and possibilities, and plays with the very line along which time should run.