352 pages
English language
Published Dec. 1, 2015 by Vintage.
Station Eleven is a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, her fourth. It takes place in the Great Lakes region before and after a fictional swine flu pandemic, known as the "Georgia Flu", has devastated the world, killing most of the population. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015.The novel was well received by critics, with praise emphasizing the understated nature of Mandel's writing. It appeared on several end-of-year best novel lists. By 2020 it had sold 1.5 million copies.
one of those books that are really good from the literary point of view but that i didn't enjoy reading... for some reason. you'll have to read it for yourself though to see what i mean ;-)
Beautiful and haunting
Beautiful. Usually I dislike narratives that jump perspectives and time frames, but Mandel does it in a way that feels meaningful rather than a gimmick or ploy to keep the reader's attention. Her parallelism and observations in both character dialogue and narrative feel like poetry.
This book is a meditation on isolation, endings, and human nature.
I feel like this book happened in the same universe as Lily Brooks-Dalton's "Good Morning, Midnight," where a man waiting to die in the arctic outlives the rest of humanity (save the returning crew of the first manned ship to Jupiter.)
Gorgeous and heartbreaking. I've heard so many good things about this book and I'm happy to report they are all true. This book follows the lives of several characters in three different points of time: decades before the Georgia Flu, as the Flu breaks out across the globe and civilization breaks down, and twenty years after the Flu. The story weaves back and forth between the three time-periods, focusing mostly on the Year Zero (and soon after) and the Year Twenty.
I fell into the story Mandel weaves and I would sometimes have this weird dissociative feeling when I looked up and there was electricity and running water.
And despite all the death and destruction and awfulness, this book is also hopeful. Because despite it all, human decency survives in some fashion. And people still enjoy music and theater, and form bonds and move on with life as best they …
Gorgeous and heartbreaking. I've heard so many good things about this book and I'm happy to report they are all true. This book follows the lives of several characters in three different points of time: decades before the Georgia Flu, as the Flu breaks out across the globe and civilization breaks down, and twenty years after the Flu. The story weaves back and forth between the three time-periods, focusing mostly on the Year Zero (and soon after) and the Year Twenty.
I fell into the story Mandel weaves and I would sometimes have this weird dissociative feeling when I looked up and there was electricity and running water.
And despite all the death and destruction and awfulness, this book is also hopeful. Because despite it all, human decency survives in some fashion. And people still enjoy music and theater, and form bonds and move on with life as best they can.
Probably shouldn't read post-apocalyptic literature the same week the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 3 minutes to midnight.
Oh dear, another one of those award winning books that has gone over my head. Very mediocre story, been down many times before and brings nothing new to the genre. I can sort of see what the plan was with this book, riding on the coat tails of the mighty world war z, shame it wasn't executed well enough. Too much of the story is based in the past and not enough time is spent on the evolution of the characters after the apocalypse.
The book had a strong ending so it got an extra star for that. I think something that would have given this book more of an edge would have been the addition of bits of the graphic novel/comic that is mentioned throughout the story.
I'm sure this is going to be made into a movie/TV series at some point and I have to admit I'm looking …
Oh dear, another one of those award winning books that has gone over my head. Very mediocre story, been down many times before and brings nothing new to the genre. I can sort of see what the plan was with this book, riding on the coat tails of the mighty world war z, shame it wasn't executed well enough. Too much of the story is based in the past and not enough time is spent on the evolution of the characters after the apocalypse.
The book had a strong ending so it got an extra star for that. I think something that would have given this book more of an edge would have been the addition of bits of the graphic novel/comic that is mentioned throughout the story.
I'm sure this is going to be made into a movie/TV series at some point and I have to admit I'm looking forward to what they can do with it.
