Name: Station Eleven
Rating: 4.143147208121827 (985 reviews)
ISBN: 9780385353304

Emily St. John Mandel

The sudden death of a Hollywood actor during a production of King Lear marks the beginning of the world's dissolution, in a story told at various past and future times from the perspectives of the actor and four of his associates. By the author of The Lola Quartet. 50,000 first printing.

Station Eleven

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, this 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.

Josephine Cammarano

"Okay, say you go into the break room," she said, "and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then two or three annual weekend of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens to your life".

SO interesting g but also a very dense and somewhat confusing read. reread the first couple of chapters a couple times before I understood the timeline better. the station eleven comic in the book reminds me of the “saturn apartments” manga!!!

Sarah H

Greg Talbot

"I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth" (p.42). Shakespeare is so good, he survives the apocalypse. And Mandel crafts a young adult fiction with the bard's ingenuity and a good dose of viral infection panic. We enter the postmodernity from the the theater of a production of King Lear...as the wren flies, and as Arthur (Lear) falls from the stage, we expand to the future and the remembered past. Like an ocean spilling into tributaries, Arthur's history is unearthed and informs all the other character stories. As for the storyline- Arthur's story from doe-eyed but willing actor to major player in Hollywood was probably my favorite story within the book. The emotional damages, the unspooling of his regrets of failed loves and distance from his kids was incredibly moving to me. Also, I admired Mandel's apocalyptic vision as being so tethered to the unfinished past. Stories of collecting artifacts, of envisioning spiritual meaning from remnants left behind, and continuing with stories of the past "the traveling Shakespeare company", made for a really entertaining read. Not unlike the year of Lear, 1608, where the plague took the lives and soul of England...the ability to move forward to persist and flourish is explored. In jest, there is truth, and in Station Eleven there we find humor, joy, hope and unbounded faith in the new explorers.

Amazing premise. Not so amazing execution.

Lilah Welch

aishah

Jennifer

Some moments of the book were very poignant and made me think, so it deserves at least four stars. I liked how the stories were interwoven through time. It was kind of boring at times though, so I think four stars is sufficient.

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells 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. A National Book Award Finalist A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist 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 new novel, The Glass Hotel, available now.

A novel

During the pandemic, someone said that being an artist is useless. They’re not essential workers, and there's no way to make money from art, as no one would spend their money on art. But I argued that art is what makes him go on during these dark times. All the things he’s consuming are art, made by artists who may or may not be starving but they kept on doing art anyway. Sure, people will spend money on food first, but when their needs are fulfilled, it is art they reach out for. I don’t think he understood what I meant at the time. He seem to be an aspiring artist on survival mode. I hope he’s doing well now.

This is what’s going through my mind while reading parts of Station Eleven. The world they knew has ended but art is what pushed them to keep on living in this dark new world. The written words, music, visual art, and poetry. It is still a world worth living.

Nate

During the pandemic, someone said that being an artist is useless. They’re not essential workers, and there's no way to make money from art, as no one would spend their money on art. But I argued that art is what makes him go on during these dark times. All the things he’s consuming are art, made by artists who may or may not be starving but they kept on doing art anyway. Sure, people will spend money on food first, but when their needs are fulfilled, it is art they reach out for. I don’t think he understood what I meant at the time. He seem to be an aspiring artist on survival mode. I hope he’s doing well now.

This is what’s going through my mind while reading parts of Station Eleven. The world they knew has ended but art is what pushed them to keep on living in this dark new world. The written words, music, visual art, and poetry. It is still a world worth living.

This was my second time reading from Emily St. John Mandel. Although I did like Sea of Tranquility more than Station Eleven, I must say this has much to recommend it.

If the writing seems less "polished" - if I might say so, when comparing it to Sea of Tranquility - and at times the authorial purpose is much more evident, I still liked reading this most of the time and it grew on me as the story went. On the other hand, some of the best parts of the novel are very specific moments where the author writes a character's heart straight into you.

The plot is a conjunction of multiple threads that meet, through time, at the mirror point that is the day of the pandemic. There's a flux of growing and diminishing entropy that one feels while following many stories. The world had the global shock, but each person had a very different voyage, not always parallel. 

The characters have moments when one feels for them, for their plight, their chaos,  their existencial losses, for their simple aims and purpose.

Emily St. John Mandel doesn't teach the apocalypse, the post-apocalypse or the impeachable failures of humanity, as much as she explores possibility - hope and fear, salvation and doom, choice and contingency - and imagines how much good and bad can come from who we are now and who we could become in a short moment, if our lives had a chance or a forced upheaval.

André Nóbrega

This was my second time reading from Emily St. John Mandel. Although I did like Sea of Tranquility more than Station Eleven, I must say this has much to recommend it.

If the writing seems less "polished" - if I might say so, when comparing it to Sea of Tranquility - and at times the authorial purpose is much more evident, I still liked reading this most of the time and it grew on me as the story went. On the other hand, some of the best parts of the novel are very specific moments where the author writes a character's heart straight into you.

The plot is a conjunction of multiple threads that meet, through time, at the mirror point that is the day of the pandemic. There's a flux of growing and diminishing entropy that one feels while following many stories. The world had the global shock, but each person had a very different voyage, not always parallel. 

The characters have moments when one feels for them, for their plight, their chaos,  their existencial losses, for their simple aims and purpose.

Emily St. John Mandel doesn't teach the apocalypse, the post-apocalypse or the impeachable failures of humanity, as much as she explores possibility - hope and fear, salvation and doom, choice and contingency - and imagines how much good and bad can come from who we are now and who we could become in a short moment, if our lives had a chance or a forced upheaval.

Added The Glass Hotel to my wishlist.

a cautionary tale about the dangers of single parenting and religious fanaticism. i found SoT to be much more interesting, although both novels had the effect of me checking how many more pages i had left and sighing in exasperation, and then actually reaching the end and wishing there was more depth to the tale. i loved SoT for its simplicity (chekhov’s gun as a storytelling device felt natural), and though SE had the same satisfaction of every character’s narrative falling together, as awfully pedestrian as this will sound: i was simply bored. 

That fact that this was written before Covid is terrifying, the fact that I keep expecting zombies to walk out shows I've watched too much The Walking Dead. Another brilliant, brain bending read from Emily St John Mandel, a master writer at knitting together different storylines and making you go ohhhhh! 

Beth Bartholomew

Zachary Roberts

The plot isn't original in itself, but I loved how everything came together in the end. I also appreciated the use of different means to tell the story (letters, interviews, comic books lines...)

Gemma

Really wanted to love this, but found it a real struggle.  I found the narrator boring and uninteresting which i think switched me completely off! 

Aims

This is one of the few books that I’ve finished and felt like reading again someday. It’s beautifully written - especially for an apocalyptic book! Great plot twist too. 

Harlee K

I liked the idea of this book so much, but I just did not connect to the way the book was written. I spent a lot of time wondering about what the overall point of the book was and by the time the end came around I was startled by it. It felt very sudden and out of nowhere to me and just didn’t leave me with any kind of closure. I think this would make a very interesting tv show, but as a book it was lacking for me. 

I had trouble getting into this book. It was a day in the life style book and I just felt like I was staring through a window at the craziness of the dystopian world, but there wasn’t much plot to the story.

Station Eleven

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