In her latest book, The Sea of Tranquility, the character of Olive Llewellyn, a stand-in for Ms Mandel, is an author whose book about a pandemic is published just before an actual pandemic takes hold. A similar thing happened to Ms Mandel, whose 2014 novel Station Eleven, about the near-end of humanity after a pandemic, became a bestseller again during the height of Covid-19 and was adapted into a critically acclaimed series on HBO Max.
