Station Eleven

Bursting with themes and ideas, Station Eleven is a literary novel that uses the architecture of dystopian fiction to ask searching questions about art and life, survival and decay. Mandel skillfully details the relationships between a group of travelling actors before and after a flu pandemic wipes out 99% of the world’s population.

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again.

Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened. If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

MEDIA REVIEWS

Mandel’s beautiful depiction of the survival of human culture and art in a post-apocalyptic world, Perfect for fans of The Handmaid’s Tale. - Cosmopolitan

The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t the only one out there to examine life in a dystopia or collapsing society, or examine the challenges women face when confronting an authoritative power. - The Verge

A dystopian novel that every woman should read after The Handmaid’s Tale. - Refinery29.com

Glorious, unexpected, superbly written; just try putting it down. - The Times

One of the 2014 books that I did read stands above all the others, however: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel . . . It's a deeply melancholy novel, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac, a book that I will long remember, and return to. - George R. R. Martin

Disturbing, inventive and exciting, Station Eleven left me wistful for a world where I still live. - Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist

Once in a very long while a book becomes a brand new old friend, a story you never knew you always wanted. Station Eleven is that rare find that feels familiar and extraordinary at the same time, expertly weaving together future and present and past, death and life and Shakespeare. This is truly something special. - Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

Visually stunning, dreamily atmospheric and impressively gripping . . . Station Eleven is not so much about apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning; the effort of art to deepen our fleeting impressions of the world and bolster our solitude. - Guardian

Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn't have put it down for anything. I think this one is really going to go places. - Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder

A beautiful and unsettling book - Sunday Express