A guide to Emily St. John Mandel's books in order

Emily St. Mandel's debut is a gripping piece of crime fiction: a depiction of a life on the run; a portrait of a woman who lives only in the present tense. Unable to remember her life before being taken (apparently willingly) from her mother under cover of darkness, and constantly on the road, Lilia is never more than a few weeks away from her last night somewhere. But then she meets Eli, who's not ready to let her go without a fight. And he isn't the only one following her. The twin mysteries – why Lilia left, and why an obsessive PI who finds her, continues to follow, long after his official pursuit is over – make this a gripping, haunting book, the writing akin to the air just before it snows, the final chapters in Montreal a dark, brittle, navy. 

The opening events of Emily St. John Mandel's second novel have a surreal, almost Kafkaesque quality. As Anton Waker prepares to marry his fiancé for the third time, he is suddenly moved from a managerial position in a New York consultancy to an isolated office on an otherwise uninhabited mezzanine level, where he has no work to do and is ignored by IT support. As Anton's backstory, and that of his secretary, Elena, tantalizingly drip through the present-day narrative, a story of people trafficking, blackmail and fugatives, of all kinds, gradually reveals itself. 

As high school comes to an end, The Lola Quartet (Jack, Daniel, Sasha and Gavin) play one last concert. During the final song, Gavin's girlfriend Anna delivers a message via paper aeroplane – I'm sorry –  and disappears. Ten years later, Gavin sees a photograph of a little girl who looks uncannily like him and who shares Anna's surname, and everything starts to come loose. As Gavin tries to track the girl down, a frightening story of teenage mistakes, fragile memories and a stolen $121,000 begins to emerge.

One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage while performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America, and the world is never the same again. The carefully plotted time-slip narrative moves between the years before, during and after a virus kills 99.9% of the world's population. Twenty years after the almost complete collapse of civilisation, a group of musicians and actors called The Travelling Symphony journey across an almost-deserted United States, bringing a little light to the settlements that have grown up since. But then they start to hear stories about a mysterious, and dangerous, Prophet. Already a critical and commercial success, Station Eleven gained thousands of new readers in 2020 thanks to its eerily prescient post-pandemic dystopian setting.

‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass.’ A hooded figure scrapes a provocative note into a window. A New York financier hands a beautiful bartender his card. A Ponzi scheme collapses, and a woman disappears from the deck of a container ship. Fans will enjoy spotting the connections and allusions to the events of Mandel's previous novel, but this is a parallel universe of Station Eleven rather than a sequel. It's an elegant exploration of guilt, grief and regret, Mandel's crystal prose shining like the glass hotel out of the darkness. 

It is perhaps not surprising that a novelist who is so expert with time-slip narratives would come to write an out-and-out time travel book and Sea of Tranquility is the most overtly science-fiction of Mandel's novels. An exiled Englishman in the early twentieth century, a writer trapped far from home in the future and a girl destined to die too young in the present day, each glimpse a world that is not their own, and a time-traveler is sent back from the 2400s to investigate. Sea of Tranquility is much more explicitly linked to the world(s) of The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven than those novels are to each other, and acts as a kind of meta-fictional response to the latter – the book's cast of characters include a writer famous for a pandemic novel, caught up in a pandemic.