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.
I've read a lot of modern dystopian/post-apoc fiction (mostly of the YA variety, granted), and at this point it's hard to impress me since so much of it relies on the same tropes. Yes, the idea of a technology-stripped wasteland has been done before, but this take was still fresh. Setting the majority of the novel twenty years after the downfall of humanity was perfect, as it allowed Mandel to explore the nostalgia older adults had for the past and also the incomprehensibility of the old world to the younger generation. At first I thought the focus on a movie star in a novel about a plague-destroyed world was incongruous, but it totally worked. The juxtaposition between the opulence of Arthur's life and the desolate years after his death was fascinating, but it was more than that - there was a symmetry in the isolation of fame and of the apocalypse. Beautiful, lush writing, too.
