An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. A National Book Award FinalistA PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist Kirsten Raymonde will never forget …
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.
Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, The Glass Hotel, available in March.
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This book starts with a frightening and believable premise. A doctor in a hospital in Toronto phones his best friend to tell him there is a highly infectious and deadly strain of flu in the city and he should stock up on provisions and barricade himself inside. Within two weeks, almost all the world’s inhabitants are dead.
The rest of this …
This is one book I could read again and have thinking about lately. I liked the way the story unfolded in the present and the imagined future, eventually bringing all of the characters together in a frightening new reality after a pandemic disease destroys most of the human race.
I avoided reading Station Eleven when it first came out, partly because it received so much hype, but also because I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic literature in general. Most of the character development in those books is so scanty that I feel like I’m reading paragraphs about ideas instead of being absorbed in worlds inhabited by real people. …
Station Eleven made for an eerie yet strangely hopeful read in the midst of a global pandemic.
I picked up Station Eleven with the mistaken impression it was futuristic science fiction (I was going by word of mouth recommendations,not necessarily the actual blurb!) and was surprised to find a post apocalyptic virus story instead. Featuring real characters and a twisting, turning narrative that links them, Station Eleven kept me turning …
Station Eleven is one of the best novels I’ve read in 2014. And I’ve read quite a few. I guess if I had to define it, I could call it a post-apocalyptic novel, although the action moves forward and back between events that happened mostly shortly before the flu epidemic that killed 99% of the World’s population (sometimes some years before) and …
This is a multiple award-winning post-apocalyptic novel that really deserves its acclaim. It always seemed to me that post-apocalyptic novels seemed to fall into 1 of 2 categories: either the apocalypse happened long ago in the past in order to justify the author’s radically different society or it happened more recently and all the people run …
Post apocalypse, how much we take for granted
Most post-apocalyptic stories, including my own, tend to focus on the world after the end times. This book does as well for a good chunk of it, but there is also much more credence given to flashback chapters detailing the last days and years leading up to the end of the world.
Considering the days we are currently living in, the reason the world …
I wanted to write this, my first book review of the new year, before the afterglow of reading Station Eleven fades.
First of all, Ms. Mandel’s writing is beautiful. Instinctive is the word that comes to mind. The interior monologues of the characters appear as thoughts do, sometimes fragmented, sometimes having little or nothing to do with the …
Such a timely read in 2020. Yikes!
It starts obliquely. Nothing much happening apart from a middle-aged actor going through multiple mid-life crises and messing up his lines, before collapsing on stage. Who would have guessed that it would turn out to be an end-of-the-world story?
I would have said that I didn’t like post-apocalyptic as a genre. But there is something more to …
I’ve never been really into dystopian fiction, but I loved Station Eleven! It’s engaging, fast paced, and the characters are well rounded and relatable. This book is truly unique as well! The idea of a traveling Shakespeare group after the world has (essentially) ended is really interesting, but maybe I’m required to love anything Shakespeare as …
In recent years I’ve gone off post apocalyptic literature but this was a thoughtful examination with an engaging heroine.
Apocalyptical storm, disturbing and different. A classic.
Fantastic story!
This story is an interwoven braid of stories and lives that intertwine with each other at different points. It is beautiful and haunting at times. I felt melancholy but joyful, it was an unusual experience, that I enjoyed alot. To experience such deferring emotions from points in these characters lives because their stories are in a way a tragic …
“Literary post-apocalyptic novel” probably isn’t a genre you think about a lot, and if you do, the list of authors you think of probably ends with Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood. Yet that’s what we have here, for all that portends.
Taking place over a roughly thirty-year period bridging a flu pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s …
If you’d like to read about life after a fictional pandemic far more devastating (so far) than COVID-19, STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel is an excellent choice. I found it difficult to put down, and that’s not typical for me.
At times the story was alarming. Could our pandemic go in this direction? At other times, it made me feel better …
By far the best post-apocalyptic book ever!