Science Fiction
![Emily St. John Mandel - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_emily_st_john_mandel.jpg)
Station Eleven
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST • Set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse-the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. • Now an original series on HBO Max. • Over one million copies sold!
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band's existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.
Look for Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band's existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.
Look for Emily St. John Mandel's bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!
Editorial Reviews
A National Book Award Finalist • A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Buzzfeed, and Entertainment Weekly, Time, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Minnesota Public Radio, The Huffington Post, BookPage, Time Out, BookRiot
"Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn't have put it down for anything." -Ann Patchett
"A superb novel . . . [that] leaves us not fearful for the end of the word but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to." -George R. R. Martin
"Absolutely extraordinary." -Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus
"Darkly lyrical. . . . A truly haunting book, one that is hard to put down." -The Seattle Times
"Tender and lovely. . . . Equal parts page-turner and poem."-Entertainment Weekly
"Mesmerizing." - People
"Mandel delivers a beautifully observed walk through her book's 21st century world…. I kept putting the book down, looking around me, and thinking, ‘Everything is a miracle.'"-Matt Thompson, NPR
"Magnificent." -Booklist
"My book of the year."-Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
"Unmissable. . . . A literary page-turner, impeccably paced, which celebrates the world lost." -Vulture
"Haunting and riveting."-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Station Eleven is the kind of book that speaks to dozens of the readers in me-the Hollywood devotee, the comic book fan, the cult junkie, the love lover, the disaster tourist. It is a brilliant novel, and Emily St. John Mandel is astonishing." -Emma Straub, author of The...
"Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn't have put it down for anything." -Ann Patchett
"A superb novel . . . [that] leaves us not fearful for the end of the word but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to." -George R. R. Martin
"Absolutely extraordinary." -Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus
"Darkly lyrical. . . . A truly haunting book, one that is hard to put down." -The Seattle Times
"Tender and lovely. . . . Equal parts page-turner and poem."-Entertainment Weekly
"Mesmerizing." - People
"Mandel delivers a beautifully observed walk through her book's 21st century world…. I kept putting the book down, looking around me, and thinking, ‘Everything is a miracle.'"-Matt Thompson, NPR
"Magnificent." -Booklist
"My book of the year."-Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
"Unmissable. . . . A literary page-turner, impeccably paced, which celebrates the world lost." -Vulture
"Haunting and riveting."-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Station Eleven is the kind of book that speaks to dozens of the readers in me-the Hollywood devotee, the comic book fan, the cult junkie, the love lover, the disaster tourist. It is a brilliant novel, and Emily St. John Mandel is astonishing." -Emma Straub, author of The...
Readers Top Reviews
J. HoltColetteBra
Long rambling narrative with a scattered plotline that doesnt deliver. The sample reads great if, like me, you love post apocalyptic novels but after that, this story goes nowhere over a very long time. I persevered to the end but it really was not worth it. It was well written but it's not a climactic page turner. If you appreciate good sci-fi then you will also find this is full of holes. Best post apocalyptic sci-fi I read recently is the Bobiverse series, which was recommended on a review here somewhere, try that instead.
M. DowdenJ. HoltC
As you can see there are a number of lower starred reviews on this site, and there is probably a good reason for this. It seems that people expected to read a post-apocalyptic novel, and that is it, but although of course although this story does fall into that category, there is a lot more to it, meaning that this is more of a genre crossing tale. We have the years after the singular event that causes the post-apocalyptic dystopia that we read of, but we also have before then and not only the events that led up to the massive flu pandemic, Georgia Flu here, but people who are in one way or another circling the actor, Arthur Leander. As we read this we see how important this character is, although he spectacularly dies on stage near the beginning of this, whilst playing King Lear. Of course, it is unlikely that a pandemic would kill so many people throughout the world in so quick a period, and there is missing some of the really hard-hitting pieces about life immediately after such an event, although rape and murder do come up in the story. This tale concentrates on other things, which makes it so interesting and giving us food for thought that is usually missed. We meet throughout this book then characters who are related to Leander, through marriage, and even his child, as well as friends of his, and those who for one reason or another have come into contact with him. This may not seem that important at the beginning of this, but it is as you read further into the tale. By flicking between the past and the present so Emily St John Mandel keeps us intently reading, as we see how all the different pieces come together. We read of Kirsten here then who is travelling with the Symphony, a company that puts on musical events and Shakespearean plays, and as we see, when they eventually reach a town on their usual circuit to pick up a couple of their members, so things have changed, with the so-called Prophet in charge, and his cult. Kirsten was a child actor, who was there when Leander died, and also who was given a couple of comics by him, which were created by his first wife. This is only one link we see between the past and present. This makes us think of the importance of art and culture on our lives, as well as the loss of those we know, and nostalgia for a past that no longer exists. Therefore memory plays a part here, and how civilisation plays an important part of our lives. By the latter years mentioned here, so life has sort of fallen into a routine, where some control and a touch of normality has started to seep into the everyday. This reminds us that although after some cataclysmic event life may change, eventually it will all fall back into a certain normality, and we can see this throughout history, with the plague, and other epidemics. Whilst people from before such an event are alive, so thin...
The Middle ShelfM
It all begins an evening in Toronto. A man goes to see King Lear with his girlfriend. A famous actor plays Lear but during the madness scene he collapses on stage. The man, who has medical training rushes to the stage to help but the famous actor dies. He goes out of the theatre. It's night, everyone is gone, his girlfriend didn't wait for him. He starts walking back home when he receives a call on his mobile from one of his friend who works in a hospital. He tells him to stock on food and to lock himself in his flat: a pandemic is spreading. Station Eleven isn't your usual apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novel: the focus isn't the pandemic itself. The story isn't a linear one and alternates, without any obvious logic at first, between moments before the pandemic, during the pandemic or after it. The reader realises quite quickly that the focus actually is the characters and the consequences of the pandemic on them. There's no epic tale of survival, but tales of self-discovery and how to find your place in this world. I have really loved the style: it's beautiful written, sometimes very striking, and Emily St John Mandel varies her narrative choices. Some readers may dislike the absence of linearity: clearly, it's not Flood by Baxter, and it can be frustrating to lose the storyline of one character without knowing if St John Mandel will go back to him or her. But this absence of linearity is actually what makes the beauty of the story: the characters' fate and their choices are examined under an unexpected angle. In a linear story, you wouldn't have felt a single shred of pity for some of them, but with this storytelling choice, they suddenly appear in a completely different light. The story doesn't really bring anything new to the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genre, but it is gripping and sometimes very touching. It is a remarkably beautiful and emotional novel that left me speechless for a few minutes after having finished it.
Mal WarwickThe Mi
This is not the plot for Emily St. John Mandel’s captivating post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven: Doctor Eleven has fled the destruction of Earth to take up residence on Station Eleven, a space station the size of a small planet that is nearly covered by water. (He has taken his name from that of the station.) There, he struggles against the dark forces of the Undersea, who have murdered his mentor and the station’s former chief, Lonagan. That was no plot synthesis. It’s the prophetic storyline of a series of graphic novels created over several years by Miranda Carroll, one of the central characters in the intricate web of events St. John Mandel relates in her engrossing novel. Though the comic books appear to be incidental early in the story, they crop up again and again along the way and will prove to be the thread that ties together the fates of the novel’s characters. Station Eleven is, at heart, the story of an A-list Hollywood film star named Arthur Leander and several of the people whose lives cross with him before the Collapse. Leander, playing the part of King Lear in a stage production in Toronto, suffers a heart attack and collapses on-stage during Act IV. A paramedic-in-training named Jeevan Chaudhary instantly leaps onto the stage from the audience but is unable to save him. The tragedy is witnessed by Kirsten Raymonde, one of three eight-year-old girls who have been playing small, silent roles in the production. Meanwhile, a virulent mutation of influenza, called the Georgian Flu, has been killing off the population of Georgia and Russia and is rapidly fanning out across the world in airplanes filled with refugees from the pandemic. Arthur has died just days before the disease reaches North America. St. John Mandel’s story unfolds in a rapid succession of short scenes in the post-apocalyptic world along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan 15 and 20 years after the collapse. “Collapse” is the popular term for the apocalypse brought on by the pandemic. There are frequent flashbacks into the lives of the central characters: Arthur Leander; Miranda Carroll, Arthur’s first wife; Elizabeth Colton, his second wife, and their son Tyler; Clark Thompson, Arthur’s British friend from acting classes in Toronto decades earlier; Kirsten, whose life St. John Mandel chronicles in detail throughout the years after the Collapse; and Jeevan Chaudhary. Through the twists and turns of the plot, the lives of these characters frequently intersect. One of them dies of the Georgian Flu. We visit the others both in flashbacks to their pre-pandemic lives and many years after the collapse. In the post-apocalyptic world of this wonderful novel, a National Book Award Finalist, there are no functioning cities. Survivors have scattered over the countryside, some of them coming together in communities of at most a couple of hu...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Jeevan's understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he'd seen a lot of action movies. He started with water, filled one of the oversized shopping carts with as many cases and bottles as he could fit. There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart-was he overreacting?-but there was a certain momentum now, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
"I'm parked just outside," he said. "I'll bring the cart back." The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a long ramp down into a small park-like arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow at the bottom of the ramp and slid sideways into a planter.
It was eleven twenty. The supermarket closed in forty minutes. He was imagining how long it would take to bring the cart up to Frank's apartment, to unload it, the time required for tedious explanations and reassurances of sanity before he could return to the grocery store for more supplies. Could there be any harm in leaving the cart here for the moment? There was no one on the street. He called Hua on his way back into the store.
"What's happening now?" He moved quickly through the store while Hua spoke. Another case of water-Jeevan was under the impression that one can never have too much-and then cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while. The hospital was full of flu patients and the situation was identical at the other hospitals in the city. The ambulance service was overwhelmed. Thirty-seven patients had died now, including every patient who'd been on the Moscow flight and two E.R. nurses who'd been on duty when the first patients came in. The shopping cart was almost unmanageably heavy. Hua said he'd called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. Jeevan was standing by the cash register again, the clerk scanning his cans and packages. The part of the evening that had transpired in the Elgin Theatre seemed like possibly a different lifetime. The clerk was moving very slowly. Jeevan passed her a credit card and she scrutinized it as though she hadn't just seen it five or ten minutes ago.
"Take Laura and your brother," Hua said, "and leave the city tonight."
"I can't leave the city tonight, not with my brother. I can't rent a wheelchair van at this hour."
In response there was only a muffled sound. Hua was coughing.
"Are you sick?" Jeevan was pushing the cart toward the door.
"Goodnight, Jeevan." Hua disconnected and Jeevan was alone in the snow. He felt possessed. The next cart was all toilet paper. The cart after that was more canned goods, also frozen meat and aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.
"I work for a charity," he said to the girl behind the cash register, his third or fourth time through, but she wasn't paying much attention to him. She kept glancing up at the small television above the film development counter, ringing his items through on autopilot. Jeevan called Laura on his sixth trip through the store, but his call went to voicemail.
"Laura," he began. "Laura." He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn't time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn't want to make eye contact with the clerk.
"Jeevan, where are you?" She sounded slightly accusatory. He handed over his credit card.
"Are you watching the news?"
"Should I be?"
"There's a flu epidemic, Laura. It's serious."
"That thing in Russia or wherever? I knew about that."
"It's here now. It's worse than we'd thought. I've just been talking to Hua. You have to leave the city." He glanced up in time to see the look the checkout girl gave him.
"Have to? What? Where are you, Jeevan?" He was signing his name on the s...
"I'm parked just outside," he said. "I'll bring the cart back." The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a long ramp down into a small park-like arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow at the bottom of the ramp and slid sideways into a planter.
It was eleven twenty. The supermarket closed in forty minutes. He was imagining how long it would take to bring the cart up to Frank's apartment, to unload it, the time required for tedious explanations and reassurances of sanity before he could return to the grocery store for more supplies. Could there be any harm in leaving the cart here for the moment? There was no one on the street. He called Hua on his way back into the store.
"What's happening now?" He moved quickly through the store while Hua spoke. Another case of water-Jeevan was under the impression that one can never have too much-and then cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while. The hospital was full of flu patients and the situation was identical at the other hospitals in the city. The ambulance service was overwhelmed. Thirty-seven patients had died now, including every patient who'd been on the Moscow flight and two E.R. nurses who'd been on duty when the first patients came in. The shopping cart was almost unmanageably heavy. Hua said he'd called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. Jeevan was standing by the cash register again, the clerk scanning his cans and packages. The part of the evening that had transpired in the Elgin Theatre seemed like possibly a different lifetime. The clerk was moving very slowly. Jeevan passed her a credit card and she scrutinized it as though she hadn't just seen it five or ten minutes ago.
"Take Laura and your brother," Hua said, "and leave the city tonight."
"I can't leave the city tonight, not with my brother. I can't rent a wheelchair van at this hour."
In response there was only a muffled sound. Hua was coughing.
"Are you sick?" Jeevan was pushing the cart toward the door.
"Goodnight, Jeevan." Hua disconnected and Jeevan was alone in the snow. He felt possessed. The next cart was all toilet paper. The cart after that was more canned goods, also frozen meat and aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.
"I work for a charity," he said to the girl behind the cash register, his third or fourth time through, but she wasn't paying much attention to him. She kept glancing up at the small television above the film development counter, ringing his items through on autopilot. Jeevan called Laura on his sixth trip through the store, but his call went to voicemail.
"Laura," he began. "Laura." He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn't time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn't want to make eye contact with the clerk.
"Jeevan, where are you?" She sounded slightly accusatory. He handed over his credit card.
"Are you watching the news?"
"Should I be?"
"There's a flu epidemic, Laura. It's serious."
"That thing in Russia or wherever? I knew about that."
"It's here now. It's worse than we'd thought. I've just been talking to Hua. You have to leave the city." He glanced up in time to see the look the checkout girl gave him.
"Have to? What? Where are you, Jeevan?" He was signing his name on the s...
