‘Station Eleven’s Emily St. John Mandel & Patrick Somerville Team For ‘The Glass Hotel’ & ‘Sea of Tranquility’ Series Adaptations In Work At HBO Max

On the heels of the success of HBO Max’s post-apocalyptic limited series Station Eleven, created by Patrick Somerville based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, Somerville and St. John Mandel Mandel are teaming up for series adaptations of Mandel’s most recent book, The Glass Hotel, and her upcoming novel Sea of Tranquility.

The two Station Eleven followup series are in development at HBO Max. Paramount TV Studios, which is behind Station Eleven, has optioned The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility and is producing the potential two new series, which are not envisioned as sequels to Station Eleven.

St. John Mandel and Station Eleven writer/showrunner Somerville will co-write both new series, which reunite the producing team behind Station Eleven. It includes St. John Mandel as well as Somerville and David Eisenberg through their company Tractor Beam, Jessica Rhoades through her Pacesetter Productions, Scott Steindorff and Dylan Russell through Stone Village Television, Hiro Murai and Nate Matteson through their banner Super Frog, and Scott Delman through his Shadowfox Productions.

Novelist St. John Mandel revealed the two new book adaptations in a New Yorker profile tied to the April 12 release of Sea of Tranquility and later tweeted the news, which was retweeted by Somerville.

“Emily has a stunning new book about to come out called Sea of Tranquility,” he said. “It has the moon, time travel, and futuristic book tours, I think I’ve made it clear I’m a big fan of one of her earlier novels, but I gotta say— this is my favorite Emily novel. It’s… incredible.”

Sea of Tranquility is described as a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

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.

The Glass Hotel is a story of crisis and survival, greed and guilt, love and delusion. In it, Jonathan Alkaitis’s billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, a bartender at the Hotel Caiette who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

The book was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020