Is a glitch revealing the flickering edges of the simulation? Or has reality simply broken? “That’s the fun thing about the simulation theory,” Mandel told me on a recent March morning. Sea of Tranquility arcs over a 500-year timeline from 1912 to 2401 and back again-a structure Mandel borrowed from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, one of her favorites-as a contingent of far-future time travelers investigate a possible “file corruption” that could prove the simulation hypothesis. And her newest, Sea of Tranquility (out April 5), finds her entering another pocket of the zeitgeist: the theory (aptly called the simulation hypothesis) that what we experience as reality is in fact an immersive virtual simulation. Her fourth novel, Station Eleven-the pandemic novel-was recently adapted into a hit HBO miniseries with Mackenzie Davis. “The way people kind of bump up against each other.” The author’s knack for pulling at the threads of connection both within and across her works, and their uncanny reflection, in turn, of contemporary themes (like, say, scams, or global pandemics and their fallout)-has earned her a reputation as something of a prophet.

“I’m very interested in group dynamics,” Mandel says. A study of the constellation of people adjacent to and implicated in a massive Ponzi scheme, the book also features a handful of characters familiar to those acquainted with Mandel’s previous work: the shipping executives Leon Prevant and Miranda Carroll, from Station Eleven the fraudulent investor Jonathan Alkaitis, from The Lola Quartet. John Mandel released her fifth novel, The Glass Hotel. In March 2020-a period that feels like it could be either an eon ago, or yesterday, or both-the author Emily St.

The glass hotel genre