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.
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.
