Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

Sept 2014 · Pan Macmillan

About this eBook

A dreamy atmospheric novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse. Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven is now an HBO Max original TV series.

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?

The New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award
Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
National Book Awards Finalist
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist

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

Station Eleven is part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Ratings and reviews

This is an unusual post apocalypse story, nominally about the world 20 years after a deadly flu epidemic. It's surprisingly gentle given the death of so many people, and the world is interesting and perhaps more realistic than standard in the genre. For me however the beauty was marred by a focus on storylines from before the apocalypse, of rich and unrelatable people. The interesting world was under used, and related to the title concept of Station 11 in a way that felt flat and disappointing.

This is really a terrific post apocalyptic novel, taking quite a different tack from similarly themed books. It's quite a gentle and forgiving world the characters find themselves in, but with enough danger to drive the plot and make the book a page turner. The story is beautifully written as well, with a complex, but never forced, non-linear narrative and an unfolding of the relationships between the characters. Highly recommended.

While the theme is not new, the treatment of it through the use of first hand accounts is. It brings a very human dimension to it, lifting it out from the usual fear and shock approach so often adapted for these kind of stories. Of course I also prescribe reading such books as a kind of reminder to us of our fragility.

About the author

Emily St. John Mandel was born in Canada and studied dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Her novels are Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun, The Lola Quartet, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. She lives in New York City.