Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I would have gotten around to reading this on my own eventually, but put it on my hold list when it appeared on Obama's summer reading list. The novel takes place mostly in the 22nd and 23rd centuries, but it begins in 1912 when Edwin, a young Englishman who offended his wealthy father, finds himself exiled to the wilds of Western Canada. He has some vague notion that he’ll take up farming, whatever that might entail. In the meantime, he pouts and drifts. This opening scene is brief, but it is the trip wire against which the book boomerangs as it shifts between centuries, and between planets in the rest of the story. There is a lot of bad news packed into this thin volume. The world is utterly transformed, and the changes are mostly implied, with allusions to China’s primacy and various independent regions of the United States. Rather than focus on technological advances and gee-whiz gadgets, the book concentrates on the psychological implications of living in domed colonies on the surface of the moon in the era of cycling pandemics and the extremes of climate change. This is science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose.