Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.

It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.

Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled down into relatively stable settlements. It follows the Travelling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel the Great Lakes region of North America performing Shakespeare and classical music, and a man who builds a museum of artifacts from the fallen civilisation. It's not about an animalistic, Hobbesian struggle for survival, but the preservation of culture and memory, and communicating what we are into the future, because, as the (borrowed) slogan of the Travelling Symphony puts it, "survival is insufficient".

It's about memory and trauma, loss, isolation and hope, it's in turn haunting and terrifying, but above all, beautiful. Loved it.