Tomorrow & tomorrow

Emily St. John Mandel was hailed as prophetic for her breakthrough novel about a pandemic. Her latest foray into the future has been shaped by that experience.

- ELISABETH EASTHER

Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian author whose fourth novel, the bestseller Station Eleven, won the 2015 Arthur C Clarke Award. It has also been adapted for television to critical acclaim. A captivating work of speculative fiction, Station Eleven depicts a pandemic that wipes out 99% of humanity. With the outbreak of Covid-19, Mandel (St. John is her middle name) was held up as an ad hoc pandemic expert, a role she resisted when her fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, was released in March 2020. As the world confronted a genuine pandemic, many readers fixated on Station Eleven’s similarities to real life. That experience is, in part, the inspiration for Mandel’s latest book, Sea of Tranquility, a time-travel novel that touches on a writer’s experience of being on a book tour during the outbreak of a global plague. Mandel, 43, lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

You grew up in rural places, notably the remote Denman Island, off the coast of Vancouver Island. What motivated your parents to move there? My parents were hippies and there was a big “back to the land” movement in the 70s and 80s, which is why we moved there when I was 10. We were also homeschooled, and I’m the second of five children.

Did that Utopian back-to-nature lifestyle suit you? The places I grew up in were rural, but they weren’t as remote as they may seem from a distance. What I really reacted against, particularly on Denman Island, was how everybody knew you and you knew everybody else. Some people love that, but to me, as a teenager, it felt claustrophobic.

How did you cope, in such an insular environment?