EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL's five previous novels include The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives in New York City.
National Book Award Finalist • Winner of the 2015 Arthur C.
Clarke Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The
Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune,
Buzzfeed, and Entertainment Weekly, Time, Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, Minnesota Public Radio, The Huffington Post, BookPage,
Time Out, Book Riot
Praise for Station Eleven:
“Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully
elegiac . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to.”
— George R. R. Martin
“Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I
wouldn’t have put it down for anything.”
— Ann Patchett
“Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, Station Eleven, begins with
a spectacular end. One night in a Toronto theater, onstage
performing the role of King Lear, 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a
fatal heart attack. There is barely time for people to absorb this
shock when tragedy on a considerably vaster scale arrives in the
form of a flu pandemic so lethal that, within weeks, most of the
world’s population has been killed . . . Mandel is an exuberant
storyteller . . . Readers will be won over by her nimble
interweaving of her characters’ lives and fates . . . Station
Eleven is as much a mystery as it is a post-apocalyptic tale . . .
Mandel is especially good at planting clues and raising the
kind of plot-thickening questions that keep the reader turning
pages . . . Station Eleven offers comfort and hope to those who
believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in
spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and when they
start building a new world they will want what was best about the
old.”
— Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review
“Last month, when the fiction finalists for the National Book
Awards were announced, one stood out from the rest: Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel . . . Station Eleven is set in a familiar
genre universe, in which a pandemic has destroyed civilization. The
twist—the thing that makes Station Eleven National Book Award
material—is that the survivors are artists . . . It’s hard to
imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to
this literary moment . . . Station Eleven, if we were to talk about
it in our usual way, would seem like a book that combines high
culture and low culture—“literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” But
those categories aren’t really adequate to describe the book . . .
It brings together these different fictional genres and the
values—observation, feeling, erudition—to which they’re linked. . .
Instead of being compressed, it blossoms.”
— Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
“Emily St. John Mandel’s tender and lovely new novel, Station
Eleven . . . miraculously reads like equal parts page-turner and
poem . . . One of her great feats is that the story feels spun
rather than plotted, with seamless shifts in time and
characters. . . “Because survival is insufficient,” reads a
line taken from Star Trek spray painted on the Traveling Symphony’s
lead wagon. The genius of Mandel’s fourth novel . . . is that she
lives up to those words. This is not a story of crisis and
survival. It’s one of art and family and memory and community and
the awful courage it takes to look upon the world with fresh and
hopeful eyes.”
— Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly
“Spine-tingling . . . Ingenious . . . Ms. Mandel gives the book
some extra drama by positioning some of her characters near the
brink of self-discovery as disaster approaches. The plague hits so
fast that it takes them all by surprise . . . Ms. Mandel is able to
tap into the poignancy of lives cut short at a terrible time — or,
in one case, of a life that goes on long after wrongs could be
righted."
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“In Station Eleven , by Emily St. John Mandel, the Georgia Flu
becomes airborne the night Arthur Leander dies during his
performance as King Lear. Within months, all airplanes are
grounded, cars run out of gas and electricity flickers out as most
of the world’s population dies. The details of Arthur’s life before
the flu and what happens afterward to his friends, wives and lovers
create a surprisingly beautiful story of human relationships amid
such devastation. Among the survivors are Kirsten, a child actor at
the time of Arthur’s death who lives with no memory of what
happened to her the first year after the flu . . . A gorgeous
retelling of Lear unfolds through Arthur’s flashbacks and Kirsten’s
attempt to stay alive.”
— Nancy Hightower, The Washington Post
“My book of the year is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. I
chose this book, because it surprised me. I’ve read a number of
post-apocalyptic novels over the years and most of them are
decidedly ungenerous toward humans and their brutishness. Station
Eleven has their same sense of danger and difficulty, but still
reads as more of a love letter — acknowledging all those things we
would most miss and all those things we would still have.”
— Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside
Ourselves
"I get slightly angry when I finish any good book — I’m miffed that
I’m not reading it anymore, and that I’ll never be able to read it
again for the first time. The last good book I read was Emily St.
John Mandel’s Station Eleven.”
— Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket
“Even if you think dystopian fiction is not your thing, I urge you
to give this marvelous novel a try. The plot revolves around a
pandemic that shatters the world as we know it into isolated
settlements and the Traveling Symphony, a roving band of actors and
musicians who remind those who survived the catastrophe about hope
and humanity. The questions raised by this emotional and thoughtful
story—why does my life matter? what distinguishes living from
surviving?—will stay with you long after the satisfying
conclusion.”
— Doborah Harkness, author of The Book of Life
“Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven sensitively explores the
dynamics of . . . a theater troupe called the Traveling Symphony
whose musicians and actors perform Shakespeare for small
communities around the Great Lakes. Ms. Mandel . . . writ[es]
with cool intelligence and poised understatement. Her real interest
is in examining friendships and love affairs and the durable
consolations of art.”
— Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“This book isn't exactly a feel-good romp, but for a
post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven comes remarkably close . . .
Emily St. John Mandel delivers a beautifully observed walk through
her book's 21st century world, as seen by characters who are
grappling with what they've lost and what remains. While I was
reading it, I kept putting the book down, looking around me, and
thinking, ‘Everything is a miracle.’”
— NPR.org
“[A] complete post-apocalyptic world is rendered in Emily St. John
Mandel’s Station Eleven, in which a hyper-virulent flu wipes out
the majority of the earth’s population and the surviving one
percent band into self-governing pods. Think of a more hopeful and
female-informed rendering of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . .
Mandel’s novel feels taut and assured... By having a pre- and
post-pandemic split screen, she is able to ask questions about
artistic creation, fame, and faith against the backgrounds of
plenty and scarcity. There is the page-turning plot and compelling
characters, but more importantly in a novel that engages with
social issues are the questions—not answered but asked.”
— Rob Spillman, Guernica
“So impressive . . . Station Eleven is terrifying, reminding us of
how paper-thin the achievements of civilization are. But it’s also
surprisingly — and quietly — beautiful . . . As Emily Dickinson
knew and as Mandel reminds us, there’s a sumptuousness in
destitution, a painful beauty in loss . . . A superb novel. Unlike
most postapocalyptic works, it leaves us not fearful for the end of
the world but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence.”
— Anthony Domestic, San Francisco Chronicle
"Darkly lyrical . . . An appreciation of art, love and the triumph
of the human spirit . . . Mandel effortlessly moves between time
periods . . . The book is full of beautiful set pieces and
landscapes; big, bustling cities before and during the outbreak, an
eerily peaceful Malaysian seashore, and an all-but-abandoned
Midwest airport-turned museum that becomes an all important setting
for the last third of the book . . . Mandel ties up all the
loose ends in a smooth and moving way, giving humanity to all her
characters — both in a world that you might recognize as the one we
all live in today (and perhaps take for granted) and a
post-apocalyptic world without electricity, smartphones and the
Internet. Station Eleven is a truly haunting book, one that is hard
to put down and a pleasure to read."
— Doug Knoop, The Seattle Times
"Mandel’s spectacular, unmissable new novel is set in a near-future
dystopia, after most — seriously, 99.99 percent — of the world’s
population is killed suddenly and swiftly by a flu pandemic. (Have
fun riding the subway after this one!) The perspective shifts
between a handful of survivors, all connected to a famous actor who
died onstage just before the collapse. A literary page-turner,
impeccably paced, which celebrates the world lost while posing
questions about art, fame, and what endures after everything, and
everyone, is gone."
— Amanda Bullock, Vulture
"Haunting and riveting . . . In several moving passages,
Mandel's characters look back with similar longing toward the
receding pre-plague world, remembering all the things they'd once
taken for granted — from the Internet to eating an orange . .
. It's not just the residents of Mandel's post-collapse world
who need to forge stronger connections and live for more than mere
survival. So do we all."
— Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel is, flat-out, one of the best
things I’ve read on the ability of art to endure in a good long
while. It’s about the ways that civilization is kept alive in a
world devastated by a plague, sure, but it’s also about the way
artists live, about the way people live, about flawed relationships
and creative pursuits and how the unlikeliest of connections can
bring transcendence."
— Tobias Carroll, Electric Literature
“Though it centers on civilization’s collapse in the aftermath of a
devastating flu, this mesmerizing novel isn’t just apocalyptic
fantasy—it’s also an intricately layered character study of human
life itself. Jumping back and forth between the decades before and
after the pandemic, the narrative interlaces several individuals’
stories, encompassing a universe of emotions and ultimately
delivering a view of life that’s both chilling and jubilant.”
— People Magazine
“If you’re planning to write a post-apocalyptic novel, you’re going
to have to breathe some new life into it. Emily St. John Mandel
does that with her new book, Station Eleven . . . The story is told
through several characters, including an A-list actor, his
ex-wives, a religious prophet and the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag
group of Shakespearean actors and musicians who travel to
settlements performing for the survivors. Each bring a unique
perspective to life, relationships and what it means to live in a
world returned to the dark ages . . . Mandel doesn’t put the
emphasis on the apocalypse itself (the chaos, the scavenging, the
scientists trying to find a cure), but instead shows the effects it
has on humanity. Despite the state of the world, people find
reasons to continue . . . Station Eleven will change the
post-apocalyptic genre. While most writers tend to be bleak and
clichéd, Mandel chooses to be optimistic and imaginative. This
isn’t a story about survival, it’s a story about living.”
— Andrew Blom, The Boston Herald
“A novel that carries a magnificent depth . . . We get to see
something that is so difficult to show or feel – how small moments
in time link together. And how these moments add up to a life . . .
Her best yet. It feels as though she took the experience earned
from her previous writing and braided it together to make one
gleaming strand . . . An epic book.”
— Claire Cameron, The Globe and Mail
“I’ve been a fan of Emily St. John Mandel ever since her first
novel . . . she’s a stunningly beautiful writer whose complex,
flawed, and well-drawn characters linger with you long after you
set her books down . . . With the release of Station Eleven—a big,
brilliant, ambitious, genre-bending novel that follows a traveling
troupe of Shakespearean actors roaming a postapocalyptic
world—she’s poised for blockbuster success. Effortlessly combining
her flawless craftsmanship, rich insights, and compelling
characters with big-budget visions of the end of the world, Station
Eleven is hands-down one of my favorite books of the year.”
— Sarah McCarry, Tor.com
“Station Eleven is a complex, eerie novel about the years
before and after a pandemic that eliminates most of humanity, save
for a troupe of actors and a few traumatized
witnesses. Mandel’s novel weaves together a post-apocalyptic
reckoning, the life of an actor, and the thoughts of the man who
tries to save him. It’s an ambitious premise, but what glues the
parts together is Mandel’s vivid, addictive language. It’s easy to
see why she’d claim this novel as her most prized: Station Eleven
is a triumph of narrative and prose, a beautifully arranged work
about art, society, and what’s great about the world we live in
now.”
— Claire Luchette, Bustle
“An ambitious and addictive novel.”
— Sarah Hughes, Guardian
“Mandel deviates from the usual and creates what is possibly the
most captivating and thought-provoking post-apocalyptic novel you
will ever read . . . Beautiful writing . . . An assured handle
on human emotions and relationships . . . Though not without
tension and a sense of horror, Station Eleven rises above the
bleakness of the usual post-apocalyptic novels because its central
concept is one so rarely offered in the genre – hope.”
— The Independent (UK)
“A beautiful and unsettling book, the action moves between the old
and new world, drawing connections between the characters and their
pasts and showing the sweetness of life as we know it now and the
value of friendship, love and art over all the vehicles, screens
and remote controls that have been rendered obsolete. Mandel's
skill in portraying her post-apocalyptic world makes her fictional
creation seem a terrifyingly real possibility. Apocalyptic stories
once offered the reader a scary view of an alternative reality and
the opportunity, on putting the book down, to look around
gratefully at the real world. This is a book to make its reader
mourn the life we still lead and the privileges we still
enjoy.”
— Sunday Express
“A haunting tale of art and the apocalypse. Station Eleven is an
unmissable experience.”
— Samantha Shannon, author of The Bone Season
“There is no shortage of post-apocalyptic thrillers on the shelves
these days, but Station Eleven is unusually haunting . . . There is
an understated, piercing nostalgia . . . there is humour, amid the
collapse . . . and there is Mandel's marvellous creation, the
Travelling Symphony, travelling from one scattered gathering of
humanity to another . . . There is also a satisfyingly circular
mystery, as Mandel unveils neatly, satisfyingly, the links between
her disparate characters . . . This book will stay with its readers
much longer than more run-of-the-mill thrillers.”
— Alison Flood, Thriller of the Month Observer
“Haunting and riveting . . . Mandel will repeatedly remind us in
this book, it's people rather than machines that make the world
spin . . . In several moving passages, Mandel's characters look
back with similar longing toward the receding pre-plague world,
remembering all the things they'd once taken for granted . . . In a
move that's sure to draw comparisons with Jennifer Egan's A Visit
from the Goon Squad, Mandel periodically travels backward in time,
allowing us to see how blind and selfish such characters were, back
in the day when they had so much and lived so small . . . As a
result, Station Eleven comes to seem less like a spaceship
reflecting how we'll live our dystopian future than a way of
thinking about how and where we're traveling here and now. It's not
just the residents of Mandel's post-collapse world who need to
forge stronger connections and live for more than mere survival. So
do we all.”
— Mike Fischer, Knoxville News-Sentinel
“Post-apocalyptic scenarios are rarely positive . . . but Mandel’s
book embraces a different view while still depicting how difficult
living would be in a desolate world.”
— Molly Driscoll, Christian Science Monitor Editors’ Pick
"Enormous scope and an ambitious time-jumping structure, Station
Eleven paints its post-apocalyptic world in both bold brushstrokes
and tiny points of background detail. As the conflicts of one era
illuminate another, a small group of interrelated characters
witnesses the collapse of the current historical age and staggers
through the first faltering steps of the next . . . [A] powerfully
absorbing tale of survival in a quarantined airport and on the
dangerous roads between improvised settlements, protected by actors
and musicians trained for gunfights. Mandel has imagined this world
in full, and her ambition and imagination on display here are
admirable."
— Emily Choate, Chapter 16
"Audacious . . . A group of actors and musicians stumble upon each
other and now roam the region between Toronto and Chicago as the
Traveling Symphony, performing Shakespeare — “A Midsummer Night’s
Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet” — for small settlements they find in the
wilderness. Their existence alone provides the novel with a strange
beauty, even hope, as one actress notes how these plays survived a
bubonic plague centuries ago . . . Station Eleven is blessedly free
of moralizing, or even much violence. If anything, it’s a book
about gratitude, about life right now, if we can live to look back
on it."
— Kim Ode, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Station Eleven . . . I couldn't resist . . . You should read it,
too . . . It'll make you marvel at the world as we know it . .
. [and] remind you the people who drive you the most crazy are
perhaps also the ones you don't want to live without."
— Mary Pauline Lowry, Huffington Post Books Blog
“Never has a book convinced me more of society’s looming demise
than Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, an apocalyptic novel
about a world just like our own that, much as our own might,
dissolves after a new strain of influenza eradicates 99 percent of
the human population. A soul-quaking premise, and a story that, I
must warn, should not be read in a grubby airport surrounded by
potential carriers of … whatever disease, take your pick . . .
Mandel displays the impressive skill of evoking both terror and
empathy . . . She has exuded talent for years . . . There is such
glory in humanity, in what we, through every plague and every age,
continue to create — like this book — and in what we are capable of
sustaining.”
— Tiffany Gibert, LA Review of Books
"Mandel comes by a now-common genre mash-up, highbrow dystopia,
honestly, following three small-press literary thrillers. By
focusing on a Shakespeare troupe roving a post-pandemic world of
sparse communities, she brings a hard-focus humanity to the form.
Repeated flashbacks to the life of an early flu victim, a Hollywood
actor who dies onstage in the character of Lear, provide both comic
relief and the pathos of a beautifully frivolous world gone
by."
— Boris Kachka's 8 Books You Need To Read This September,
Vulture
“Disappear inside the exquisite post-apocalyptic world of Emily St.
John Mandel’s Station Eleven and you’ll resurface with a greater
appreciation for the art and culture we daily take for granted.
With fearless imagination, Mandel recounts the peripatetic
adventures of an eccentric band of artists, musicians, playwrights,
and actors as they traverse the world’s dreary landscape attempting
to keep culture and art alive in the aftermath of a devastating
disease that has wiped out much of civilization . . . Strange,
poetic, thrilling, and grim all at once, Station Eleven is a
prismatic tale about survival, unexpected coincidences, and the
significance of art and its oft under-appreciated
beauty. ”
— September 2014’s Best Books, Bustle
“The most buzzed-about novel of the season.”
— Stephan Lee, Entertainment Weekly
"In this unforgettable, haunting, and almost hallucinatory portrait
of life at the edge, those who remain struggle to retain their
basic humanity and make connections with the vanished world through
art, memory, and remnants of popular culture . . . a brilliantly
constructed, highly literary, postapocalyptic page-turner."
— Lauren Gilbert, Library Journal (starred)
"This fast-paced novel details life before and after a flu wipes
out 99 percent of the earth's population . . . As the characters
reflect on what gives life meaning in a desolate, postapocalyptic
world, readers will be inspired to do the same."
— Real Simple
“Once in a very long while a book becomes a brand new old friend, a
story you never knew you always wanted. Station Eleven is that rare
find that feels familiar and extraordinary at the same time,
expertly weaving together future and present and past, death and
life and Shakespeare. This is truly something special.”
— Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus
"Station Eleven is a magnificent, compulsive novel that cleverly
turns the notion of a “kinder, gentler time” on its head.
And, oh, the pleasure of falling down the rabbit hole of Mandel’s
imagination -- a dark, shimmering place rich in alarmingly real
detail and peopled with such human, such very appealing
characters."
— Liza Klaussmann, author of Tigers in Red Weather
"Her best, most ambitious work yet. Post-apocalyptic tales are all
the rage this season, but Mandel’s intricate plotting and deftness
with drawing character makes this novel of interlinked tales stand
out as a beguiling read. Beginning with the onslaught of the deadly
Georgian flu and the death of a famous actor onstage, and advancing
twenty years into the future to a traveling troupe of Shakespearean
actors who perform for the few remaining survivors, the novel sits
with darkness while searching for the beauty in art and human
connection."
— Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview,
The Millions
“Ambitious, magnificent . . . Mandel’s vision is not only achingly
beautiful but startlingly plausible, exposing the fragile
beauty of the world we inhabit. In the burgeoning postapocalyptic
literary genre, Mandel’s transcendent, haunting novel deserves a
place alongside The Road, The Passage, and The Dog Stars.”
— Kristine Huntley, Booklist (starred)
“[An] ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive
to preserve art, culture and kindness . . . Think of Cormac
McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion . . . Mandel spins a satisfying
web of coincidence and kismet . . . Magnetic . . . a breakout
novel.”
— Kirkus (starred)
“Station Eleven is the kind of book that speaks to dozens of the
readers in me---the Hollywood devotee, the comic book fan, the cult
junkie, the love lover, the disaster tourist. It is a brilliant
novel, and Emily St. John Mandel is astonishing.”
— Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers
“Station Eleven is a firework of a novel. Elegantly constructed and
packed with explosive beauty, it's full of life and humanity and
the aftershock of memory.”
— Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
“Disturbing, inventive and exciting, Station Eleven left me wistful
for a world where I still live.”
— Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist
"A unique departure from which to examine civilization's wreckage .
. . [a] wild fusion of celebrity gossip and grim future . . .
Mandel's examination of the connections between individuals with
disparate destinies makes a case for the worth of even a single
life."
— Publishers Weekly
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