Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

Shortlisted for the 2014 National Book Awards
Observer Thriller of the Month

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 their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe.
But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.

STATION ELEVEN
Moving backwards and forwards 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: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'.

Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything - even the end of the world.

• ISBN10: 0385353316
• ISBN13: 9780385353311
• Publish Date: 9 September 2014
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: Knopf Publishing Group
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 226
• Language: English

Reviews

[laughingrachel]

Station Eleven is a rich novel that plays with the meaning of fate. It's a study in civilization collapse and rebirth told in interconnected vignettes. I really enjoyed it, it's a slow build of a book but I couldn't put it down by the final third. I definitely recommend it.

[jamiereadthis]

A story that makes me believe this is how the world ends. As beautiful as it is terrible, as peaceful as it is violent, as much grace as there is pain. It’s an interesting approach to an apocalypse, and one I appreciate: to downplay it a bit instead of overreach on the drama. (I’m looking at you, California.)

I could have loved the characters more— it was Frank and Miranda who got to me— and I could have loved the Hollywood parts more, but overall, I didn’t mind that the book seems intent on staying detached. It suits the subject. And it suits the people.

Kirsten and August walked mostly in silence. A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and then later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were left even now?

If you needed a reason why post-apocalyptic fiction appeals to me. Done right, it lets us see what we’re not seeing, all around us. I might never fly through an airport again without seeing Station Eleven and the end of the world, and I don’t believe that’s a bad thing.

On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.

There was a stupid moment or two when he stood near the front door, flipping the light switches. On/off, on/off.

“Stop it,” Frank said. “You’re driving me crazy.”

[ross91]

This book was extremely beautiful.

[mary]

A beautiful story about hope and the resilience of people. This book is about what makes life meaningful and how people cannot survive with just bare will, they need something to live for- such as art. It gives the people hope for the future. Art makes us human.

Brief. Poetic. Interesting. I never really "got" the story but the concepts were engaging.

[inlibrisveritas]

Station Eleven is one of those super hyped books that actually surprised me because of it’s substance. I tend to avoid the hype, because chances are it presents something ‘new’ but in an easy and somewhat mind-numbing way that in the end makes the story just like everything else. This is so not the case. Station Eleven is a beautifully told tale that centers around several people who in someway have a connection to a man named Arthur, who never saw the new world.

Arthur is an actor who dies on stage leaving behind several ex-wives, friend, and people who have some connection to him. 20 years after the Georgia Flu takes hold, killing most of the worlds human population, those people he’s left behind are having their stories told. I loved the back and forth narrative style that Station Eleven has. Instead of a linear story we get bits a pieces from the past of several people, some times Arthur but most of the time it’s those who knew him well or in passing. We get to see Arthur’s slow rise into stardom and his turbulent relationships, and how Kirsten and Jeevan fit into the mix and how that night changed everything.

The main theme of the story is that ‘survival is insufficient’ and I think it’s a beautiful notion to hold on to. Many of the characters carrying the past with them in some way, and those that are old enough to remember the ‘before’ try to give some of that knowledge to those who are too young or have been born into the new world. Art, music, pieces of the previous life are all things that these characters try to hold on to the most…and we get to see how that can go wrong as well. It has the beautiful literary style that helps it stick in your memory, but it doesn’t detract from the still dangerous world that these people live in. I love it when a post apocalyptic story focuses more on human nature than the actual happenings of the downfall. There is just something so poignant about reading a story where the characters are forced to rise above and seeing just how that can go so differently for each person.

The narrator, Kirsten Potter, was excellent! She had the right pacing and I found myself enjoying it quite a lot on normal speed, which is something I usually loathe doing.

Station Eleven is certainly worth the hype!

[ibeforem]

This books lives up to the hype, for the most part. It raised some interesting questions for me, like, could society really collapse in the space of days? Could we really go 20 years without some concerted effort at rebuilding? Questions like that.

It also gave me some serious anxiety. I don't think it helped that I was home alone with my son and my husband was across the country when I read about people getting stranded in an airport, basically forever. I had to put the book down for a few days!

I also wish the book had ended a bit differently. There's a scene in an air traffic control tower a few chapters from the end that would have been the perfect ending, but the book continues on. The funny thing is, when I polled a few of my fellow book club members, they thought that scene *was* the end of the book! Which I think just proves my point.

But overall, I thought this was a surprisingly hopeful dystopian tale.

[lisacee]

I don't want it to be over. Maybe there will be a sequel... Do any of these compare? http://www.bustle.com/articles/62717-if-you-loved-station-eleven-try-reading-these-9-books-too

[adamfortuna]

After winning this years Arthur C. Clarke Award, and constantly seeing it on Goodreads, I knew I wanted to give this one a shot. I appreciate the storytelling and literary side of this book more than the characters and the story. The narrative jumps time, focusing on a world before a pandemic, then again years into the future. The focus of the story is around a traveling symphony making their way around the Great Lakes. I liked the characters and the post apocalyptic world, and especially how the characters were connected, but was distracted by the Station Eleven storyline -- a comic book created by one of the characters -- which didn't add much to the story for me beyond it's symbolism.

[brokentune]

But Elizabeth was unshakable in her convictions. “Everything happens for a reason,” she said. “This will pass. Everything passes.” Clark couldn’t bring himself to argue with her.

Station Eleven tells the stories of a group of people who survive the end of the world and join a company of players moving from place to place, performing Shakespeare's plays.

Dark, realistic, layered, tightly written. Station Eleven should be everything I look for in a book, but somehow it did not keep me interested.