Will I love Station Eleven?

I’d read the reviews, so I was prepared for a great book. I wasn’t prepared to be thrown out of my comfort zone—but in the best possible way.

Mandel made me sit with what it really means to lose everything and still create something beautiful. It’s not about saving the world; it’s about creating a new dream and making it your home. I loved how it celebrates art, memory, and the strange persistence of humanity even when everything else is gone.

This book reminded me that hope is often raw, painful, and ultimately necessary.

Station Eleven was published just before the Covid 19 pandemic changed lives all over the world. That was a bit of fortuitous timing since it takes place during and after a much more deadly virus sweeps through populations. As such, many readers found the book almost comforting because it imagined not only what happens in a pandemic, but what happens aftewards. Reading the book now that Covid is disappearing into the past might seem a bit like reading newspapers from years ago--that is, reading Old News. But on the contrary doing so opens up views of human resilience that give… show more.

I don't even read science fiction and fantasy, but I read this post-apocalyptic novel three times last year and I could read it again ... it's astonishing, moving, gritty, soaring ... I loved every word and St. John Mandel is a master at the top of her craft game

I was mesmerized by St. John Mandel's world off the grid, "civilization" taken out with a deadly virus, and the consequent loss of so much that we take for granted: electricity, transportation, communication, books, government, safety. In many ways, it's the world of pioneers (as a kid, stories of the past were my passion: brave girls on wagon trains or living in danger on the frontier). The characters here must likewise rely upon their own creativity, but in this world, there is still the memory of electrification, travel, global connectivity, history, information, suffusing that primitive existence with a painful nostalgia.… show more.

Usually I go for books based on character first, but this one grabbed me with its incredible and fascinating post-apocalyptic world building. There are no zombies in this one, and most of the scary stuff is long over, but imagining how ordinary people rebuild and reform community in a post-virus world had me absolutely hooked. Life and art-affirming post-apocalypse was not what I was expecting!

This a beautifully lyrical book. The first chapter winds and twists through different scenes and places, like a gentle lake through a peaceful forest. Emily St John Mantel leads you through the past, present, and future so softly that it takes you a moment to realize the bleakness and horror of the post-pandemic world she’s describing.

I love a story told from multiple points of view, and this one is a masterclass. It weaves different events and characters so precisely that when everything comes to a head in the final chapters, it feels inevitable and natural. I also love a… show more.

I had no idea what this book was when I picked it up, largely by accident. The plot mostly takes place in the Great Lakes area. A flu pandemic kills almost everyone on earth, and the question becomes, how do you survive?

There is no electricity, internet, or cell phones. Everything has collapsed. What does survival even mean? In this case, the survival mechanism is a traveling Shakespearean troupe putting on plays in various encampments.

St. John Mandel strings the whole thing together with a graphic novel the protagonist and antagonist read many years earlier, which connects them in weird… show more.

In addition to eerily anticipating the COVID-19 pandemic—thankfully, our pathogen was not nearly as virulent and lethal—this post-apocalyptic novel offers interesting commentary about airports as microcosms of society.

The airport that figures prominently here is the gateway to and manifestation of a “secure” society structured as much by those it excludes as by those it includes. It is also the archive of a society defined, for better and for worse, by its relationship to technology. 

I loved this book because it gives a dark vision of what could go wrong if we fail to control pandemics. I read this book in 2019–just before the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave it a terrifying reality!

I am a lab scientist, and my work can focus on somewhat abstract ideas about infection, but this book inspired me to think about the (huge) human impact.

This book was hopeful in a time when I needed it the most. We’ve all recently lived through a serious global disaster where we were forced to re-evaluate our priorities and make decisions that we might not have always made to survive and maintain our sanity through a difficult situation. 

Though this book was written well before Covid–and believe me, I couldn’t have read this during Covid–it was revelatory in understanding the ways that family come together, how not all bonds are by blood, and that family can be found, can be relational, can be blood.