It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment. Same size as the book pages, folded in quarters (as issued), glossy paper, colour artwork. Its evocation of the collapse of our civilization is powerful. While her previous novels are cracking good reads, this is her best yet. While sci-fi readers will pick up the book based on the sci-fi categorization, and then be disappointed because the book isn’t sci-fi enough. It’s a sweeping look at where we are, how we got here and where we might go. One night, in a Toronto theater, onstage performing the role of King Lear, 51-year-old Arthur Leander has. Ann PatchettĪ novel that carries a magnificent depth. John Mandel’s fourth novel, Station Eleven, begins with a spectacular end. Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn’t have put it down for anything. A book that I will long remember, and return to. Critical Praiseĭeeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame and the beauty of the world as we know it. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Station Eleven moves back and forth in time, following characters like Kirsten Raymonde (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) as they struggle to live through an apocalyptic flu. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Everything you need to know: book description, quotes from the book, about the author and much more.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, from the author of three highly acclaimed previous novels.

Station eleven book cover