This book is terrific.

It’s nominally an end of the world story, with a killer flu that wipes out most of the world population. There are all the usual trappings here of a dark post-apocalypse story that we’ve come to expect from the Road or the Passage or the Walking Dead. In that sense this book is nothing new, genre-wise.

But where Station Eleven succeeds is in the tight focus on the characters, all of which are family or friends or people who just had a passing encounter with one character, Arthur Leander, who dies in the first few pages.

The story weaves in and out of time before and after the apocalypse, drawing and linking the characters together in rich and complex ways, with the relationships and experiences and simple objects passed from hand to hand. (I had to go back and search for some of those objects after I had finished the book, to find the threads.) Station Eleven is one of those objects, a comic book with a dark (and somewhat obvious) metaphor that reminds me a lot of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story (also in a comic book) from Watchmen.

For a post-apocalyptic genre story it is an elegy to the world that has passed, but it is also extremely hopeful. Things fall apart after the apocalypse, and bad people do bad things, but at core we remain essentially good, we care for each other, and we rebuild. It’s a nice change from the never-ending bleakness that one often finds in these stories, and very nicely done.

It’s wonderfully written, meticulously crafted, hard to put down, and easily one of the best books I’ve read in the last year.