Station Eleven
A Novel
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4.3 • 474 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES
Finalist for CBC Canada Reads 2023
Winner of the Toronto Book Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award
Finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Sunburst Award
Longlisted for the Baileys Prize and for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
A New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller
A Best Book of the Year in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Time magazine
An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition, set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse
Day One
The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.
Week Two
Civilization has crumbled.
Year Twenty
A band of actors and musicians, called the Travelling Symphony, move through the territories of a changed world, performing concerts and Shakespeare at the settlements that have formed. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the world every hopeful survivor has tried to rebuild.
Moving backward and forward in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: celebrated actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan, a bystander warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife, Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend, Clark; Kirsten, an actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed "prophet."
Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the fragility of life, the relationships that sustain us, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You’ve never encountered a post-apocalyptic tale quite like Station Eleven, which follows (among other things) a troupe of Shakespearean actors who traverse the blasted American Midwest to keep the spirit of theatre and music alive. Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel is sure to put the indie darling on the map. The writing is startlingly elegant, and the interwoven stories of her characters—who yearn for long-gone comforts like TV sitcoms, airplanes, and the Internet—seem splendidly and heartbreakingly real.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Few themes are as played-out as that of post-apocalypse, but St. John Mandel (The Lola Quartet) finds a unique point of departure from which to examine civilization's wreckage, beginning with a performance of King Lear cut short by the onstage death of its lead, Arthur Leander, from an apparent heart attack. On hand are an aspiring paramedic, Jeevan Chaudary, and a young actress, Kirsten Raymonde; Leander's is only the first death they will witness, as a pandemic, the so-called Georgia Flu, quickly wipes out all but a few pockets of civilization. Twenty years later, Kirsten, now a member of a musical theater troupe, travels through a wasteland inhabited by a dangerous prophet and his followers. Guided only by the graphic novel called Station Eleven given to her by Leander before his death, she sets off on an arduous journey toward the Museum of Civilization, which is housed in a disused airport terminal. Kirsten is not the only survivor with a curious link to the actor: the story explores Jeevan's past as an entertainment journalist and, in a series of flashbacks, his role in Leander's decline. Also joining the cast are Leander's first wife, Miranda, who is the artist behind Station Eleven, and his best friend, 70-year-old Clark Thompson, who tends to the terminal settlement Kirsten is seeking. With its wild fusion of celebrity gossip and grim future, this book shouldn't work nearly so well, but St. John Mandel's examination of the connections between individuals with disparate destinies makes a case for the worth of even a single life.
Customer Reviews
Awesome read
Great book! Interesting to see how different the current pandemic could have been. Always nice to get a different perspective. Someone in the world always has it worse than you. Would recommend to others!
A gripping story
I had the odd experience of reading this book while I was also reading a non-fiction book about the COVID pandemic, written by an old friend of mine with whom I have recently reconnected. There were times when the narrative of the novel ran jarringly into the history of the disease. I can heartily recommend Stopping the Next Pandemic as well as this book. The novel bounces back-and-forth between the events in the lives of major characters leading up to the onslaught of the disease and the decades following the end of the world as they knew it.
Loved
Loved this book so much! So original and insightful.