Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

Ebook, 2014

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Description

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling 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. 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.… (more)

Media reviews

Station Eleven is not so much about apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning; the effort of art to deepen our fleeting impressions of the world and bolster our solitude. Mandel evokes the weary feeling of life slipping away, for Arthur as an individual and then writ large upon
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the entire world.
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2 more
Survival may indeed be insufficient, but does it follow that our love of art can save us? If “Station Eleven” reveals little insight into the effects of extreme terror and misery on humanity, it offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived,
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that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and that when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.
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Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.

Awards

National Book Award (Finalist — Fiction — 2014)
Women's Prize for Fiction (Longlist — 2015)
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2016)
Sunburst Award (Shortlist — Adult — 2015)

Language

Original publication date

2014-09
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