"This is a very impressive work, a thrilling tale, a must read."
Winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction 2015.
Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015.
Controversial opinion incoming. Dystopian novels can feel a little masculine somehow? Do you get me? I think this explains why I haven’t read the aforementioned Cormac McCarthy. It’s very much a personal preference, but even in the darkest of dystopias, I need that glimmer of hope. I suspect Mandel is the same, and I’ve not read anything quite like this.
Her 2014 novel explores the resilience of human spirit. Following an eerily prescient covid-like virus, a troupe of actors travel an unrecognisable US, performing Shakespeare for survivors. This is a powerful story of hope, art and humanity. Mandel unfurls past and present cleverly as she brings the strands together with elan.
Following four wonderful literary crime novels (to be issued in the UK later), Canadian author Mandel breaks through with a beautifully modulated post-apocalypse tale, where a virus has decimated the world and a troupe of musicians and Shakespearean actors tour the Great Lakes area and hold up the flame of culture and civilisation. Through the prism of a variety of interlinked characters before and after the fall of society, Mandel offers a melancholy and poetic lullaby for the power of art and the succour of relationships. Full of striking images and strands: the rise and fall of a Falstaffian actor, the coming of age of a young girl in a brand new world, an airport that becomes a museum for humanity, the stark realities of a land now at war with itself and full of feral survivors, a comic strip whose provenance is prophetic, Mandel weaves a clever and moving web that will stay with you for a very long time.
Chair of the Arthur C. Clarke Award judges, Andrew M Butler, said: “While many post-apocalypse novels focus on the survival of humanity, Station Eleven focuses instead on the survival of our culture, with the novel becoming an elegy for the hyper-globalised present.”
Maxim Jakubowski October 2014 Highly Recommended.
Not another plague apocalyptic book you cry! Oh yes, only this one is a bit special. It describes the ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ and the accompanying death of most of the world’s population in a highly effective, gentle way. Short snippets tell of gigantic events. We get lives before and after the ‘Georgia flu’ concentrating on an actor, a comic graphic artist and a group of travelling performers. The comic, starring one Dr Eleven, links both sections in a poignant manner. This is a very impressive work, a thrilling tale, a must read.
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.
| Primary Genre | Dystopian and utopian fiction |
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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%.
Station Eleven features in the following genres: eBooks of the Month, Recommendations, Dystopian and utopian fiction, Fiction, Speculative fiction
Paperback, CD-Audio, Hardback. Not Available.
Station Eleven was written by Emily St. John Mandel and published by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan
