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

Emiley Jones

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

Jamie Griffin

casey

But the man who walked in under low gray skies seemed less dangerous than stunned. He was dirty, of indeterminate age, dressed in layers of clothes, and he hadn't shaved in a long time. He appeared on the road with a gun in his hand, but he stopped and let the gun fall to the pavement when Tyrone shouted for him to drop it. He raises his hands over his head and stared at the people gathering around him.

Everyone had questions. He seemed to struggle for speech. His lips moved silently, and he had to clear his throat several times before he could speak. Clark realized that he hadn't spoken in some time.

"I was in the hotel," he said finally. "I followed your footprints in the snow." There were tears on his face.

"Okay," someone said, "but why are you crying?"

"I'd thought I was the only one," he said.

She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn't have been exposed to the flu. Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.

Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets and its indigo seas. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.

Naomi J.

Outside, the world was ending, and snow continued to fall.

Natalie Unsinn 

These people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. … They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. … High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially. … [They] think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. 

Laura Wilson

Hell is the absence of the people you long for

…during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream.

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. “I regret nothing,” she told her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, and believed it

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

Station Eleven quotes

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