Station Eleven: A Novel (National Book Award Finalist)

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This Anniversary Edition of Station Eleven, a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Best Book of the Twenty-First Century by the New York Times, celebrates ten years of this now iconic novel with a new color illustration and a guide to “The Mandelverse”

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days following civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

It is fifteen years after a flu pandemic wiped out most of the world's population. Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe moving over the gutted landscape, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in the outpost of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the disaster brought everyone here, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty, telling a story about the relationships that sustain us.

Review

A National Book Award Finalist • A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist • 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, BookRiot

“Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn’t have put it down for anything.” —Ann Patchett

“A superb novel . . . [that] leaves us not fearful for the end of the word but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to.” —George R. R. Martin

“Absolutely extraordinary.” —Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

“Darkly lyrical. . . . A truly haunting book, one that is hard to put down." —The Seattle Times

“Tender and lovely. . . . Equal parts page-turner and poem.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Mesmerizing.” — People

“Mandel delivers a beautifully observed walk through her book’s 21st century world…. I kept putting the book down, looking around me, and thinking, ‘Everything is a miracle.’”—Matt Thompson, NPR

“Magnificent.” —Booklist

“My book of the year.”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“Unmissable. . . . A literary page-turner, impeccably paced, which celebrates the world lost.” —Vulture

“Haunting and riveting.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“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

“Think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. . . . Magnetic.” —Kirkus (starred)

“Even if you think dystopian fiction is not your thing, I urge you to give this marvelous novel a try. . . . [An] emotional and thoughtful story.” —Deborah Harkness, author of The Book of Life

“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” —The New Yorker

“Audacious. . . . A book about gratitude, about life right now, if we can live to look back on it." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A surprisingly beautiful story of human relationships amid devastation.” —The Washington Post

“Soul-quaking. . . . Mandel displays the impressive skill of evoking both terror and empathy.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“A genuinely unsettling dystopian novel that also allows for moments of great tenderness. Emily St. John Mandel conjures indelible visuals, and her writing is pure elegance.” —Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers

“Possibly the most captivating and thought-provoking post-apocalyptic novel you will ever read.” —The Independent (London)

“A firework of a novel . . . full of life and humanity and the aftershock of memory.” —Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls

“One of the best things I’ve read on the ability of art to endure in a good long while.” —Tobias Carroll, Electric Literature

“Will change the post-apocalyptic genre. . . . This isn’t a story about survival, it’s a story about living.” —Boston Herald

“A big, brilliant, ambitious, genre-bending novel. . . . Hands-down one of my favorite books of the year.” —Sarah McCarry, Tor.com

“Strange, poetic, thrilling, and grim all at once, Station Eleven is a prismatic tale about survival, unexpected coincidences, and the significance of art.” —Bustle, “Best Book of the Month”

“Disturbing, inventive and exciting, Station Eleven left me wistful for a world where I still live.” —Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies. He started with water, filled one of the oversized shopping carts with as many cases and bottles as he could fit. There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart—was he overreacting?—but there was a certain momentum now, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“I’m parked just outside,” he said. “I’ll bring the cart back.” The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a long ramp down into a small park-like arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow at the bottom of the ramp and slid sideways into a planter.

It was eleven twenty. The supermarket closed in forty minutes. He was imagining how long it would take to bring the cart up to Frank’s apartment, to unload it, the time required for tedious explanations and reassurances of sanity before he could return to the grocery store for more supplies. Could there be any harm in leaving the cart here for the moment? There was no one on the street. He called Hua on his way back into the store.

“What’s happening now?” He moved quickly through the store while Hua spoke. Another case of water—Jeevan was under the impression that one can never have too much—and then cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while. The hospital was full of flu patients and the situation was identical at the other hospitals in the city. The ambulance service was overwhelmed. Thirty-seven patients had died now, including every patient who’d been on the Moscow flight and two E.R. nurses who’d been on duty when the first patients came in. The shopping cart was almost unmanageably heavy. Hua said he’d called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. Jeevan was standing by the cash register again, the clerk scanning his cans and packages. The part of the evening that had transpired in the Elgin Theatre seemed like possibly a different lifetime. The clerk was moving very slowly. Jeevan passed her a credit card and she scrutinized it as though she hadn’t just seen it five or ten minutes ago.

“Take Laura and your brother,” Hua said, “and leave the city tonight.”

“I can’t leave the city tonight, not with my brother. I can’t rent a wheelchair van at this hour.”

In response there was only a muffled sound. Hua was coughing.

“Are you sick?” Jeevan was pushing the cart toward the door.

“Goodnight, Jeevan.” Hua disconnected and Jeevan was alone in the snow. He felt possessed. The next cart was all toilet paper. The cart after that was more canned goods, also frozen meat and aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.

“I work for a charity,” he said to the girl behind the cash register, his third or fourth time through, but she wasn’t paying much attention to him. She kept glancing up at the small television above the film development counter, ringing his items through on autopilot. Jeevan called Laura on his sixth trip through the store, but his call went to voicemail.

“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.

“Jeevan, where are you?” She sounded slightly accusatory. He handed over his credit card.

“Are you watching the news?”

“Should I be?”

“There’s a flu epidemic, Laura. It’s serious.”

“That thing in Russia or wherever? I knew about that.”

“It’s here now. It’s worse than we’d thought. I’ve just been talking to Hua. You have to leave the city.” He glanced up in time to see the look the checkout girl gave him.

“Have to? What? Where are you, Jeevan?” He was signing his name on the slip, struggling with the cart toward the exit, where the order of the store ended and the frenzy of the storm began. It was difficult to steer the cart with one hand. There were already five carts parked haphazardly between benches and planters, dusted now with snow.

“Just turn on the news, Laura.”

“You know I don’t like to watch the news before bed. Are you having an anxiety attack?”

“What? No. I’m going to my brother’s place to make sure he’s okay.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“You’re not even listening. You never listen to me.” Jeevan knew this was probably a petty thing to say in the face of a probable flu pandemic, but couldn’t resist. He plowed the cart into the others and dashed back into the store. “I can’t believe you left me at the theatre,” he said. “You just left me at the theatre performing CPR on a dead actor.”

“Jeevan, tell me where you are.”

“I’m in a grocery store.” It was eleven fifty-five. This last cart was all grace items: vegetables, fruit, bags of oranges and lemons, tea, coffee, crackers, salt, preserved cakes. “Look, Laura, I don’t want to argue. This flu’s serious, and it’s fast.”

“What’s fast?”

“This flu, Laura. It’s really fast. Hua told me. It’s spreading so quickly. I think you should get out of the city.” At the last moment, he added a bouquet of daffodils.

Review:

4.8 out of 5

95.00% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of Survival and Art

K.D. · August 5, 2024

Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is a masterful exploration of humanity's sense of self-preservation and survival, the power of art, and the connections that bind us. At the heart of this novel is Kirsten Raymonde, whose journey from childhood to adulthood in a post-apocalyptic world is inspiring.Introduced as a young actress in the final performance of King Lear before the Georgia Flu pandemic devastates civilization, Kirsten is thrust into a wild world. Yet, even amidst the collapse of society, her passion for the arts remains undiminished. This duality—her will to live and her dedication to preserving art—defines her character and provides the novel with a heart.As a member of the Travelling Symphony, Kirsten traverses the remnants of civilization, performing Shakespearean plays for scattered communities. The Symphony's motto, "Survival is insufficient," taken from an episode of Star trek Voyager, encapsulates the belief that life must be about more than mere survival; it must also encompass the richness of human experience, creativity, and connection.Kirsten's journey is marked by her quest to piece together her fragmented memories of the past, particularly those of her time with the actor Arthur Leander, whose death coincides with the pandemic's onset and who's the connection between all characters even if he's dead. He's also the link with the comic book Station Eleven by Miranda Carroll, the first of Arthur's ex-wives. This narrative thread underscores the novel's theme of the interconnectedness of all human lives, even in the face of societal collapse.Mandel’s portrayal of Kirsten is nuanced and deeply human. Her strength and vulnerability, her moments of reflection and action, create a character who is both relatable and heroic. Kirsten’s growth throughout the novel, from a child struggling to understand a shattered world to a woman determined to find meaning within it, is profoundly moving.Station Eleven is a triumph of literary fiction. Mandel’s exquisite prose and richly layered narrative make this novel a must-read for anyone seeking a story that beautifully balances despair and hope, isolation and connection, destruction and creation.

4.0 out of 5 stars Go gently into the night

K.P. · July 21, 2016

Before anything, I have to say that I truly enjoyed reading this book. I hold no reservations in recommending it to anyone out there who is looking for a relatively easy read that packs an emotional punch and makes a point. I give it four stars because I believe that while creating depth in most of her characters the author somehow forgot to make a cohesive plot-line, which made the text fragmented, and at times the story suffered.What makes Station Eleven (SE) an enjoyable read is the ease with which events are described. This is not an intense, end-of-the-world, "oh woe is us", apocalyptic story. Anyone who is looking for that, can find it in A Canticle for Leibowitz, Alas, Babylon, or more recently Wool, World War Z and The Road. Here you won't find a detailed and scientifically laborious effort on how things ended and how people are getting by in the aftermath. Instead, you will understand a lot more of the human psyche when the technologically-aided (and I should say, "taken for granted)" life ends and a new measure of survival emerges. This new existence is not unimaginatively brutish; but think more like pre-industrial revolution, somewhat Amish, agrarian society where a few can eke out an existence by being wandering Shakespearean minstrels.This story is mostly about the characters, not much about the events or the answers. These are not exceptional people, they are not heroes set out to change/save the world. To me, and this is important, the characters are not caricatures of human qualities. In fact, what I found to be very endearing is that most of them are just people, who by stroke of luck in their actions, locations or genetics survive a pandemic and must adapt to a suddenly vacant, unsafe world. By using a constant barrage of flashbacks and intermittent plot-lines, the author drives home the point of the fragility of our current condition and the banality of our modern existence. It presents the reader with a "before and after" which is easy to grasp and so very easy to appreciate. The story does not veer clear of sensitive topics such as exploitation by force majeure or religion, rather it blends these concepts in with the rest of the main themes (art, compassion and community) without being overly concerned about their impact in the post-flu world. There is plenty of action and a nice sprinkle of mystery, but the main draw is the comparison, nearly page-to-page, of the world that is gone and how humanity is not lost just because a smart-phone no longer turns on.There are a few things in SE which are just not up to par. I find Arthur to be a weak central figure for this story and his constant involvement hurts the plot. He is supposedly this focal character around which most of the "before and after" characters revolve, but he is monochrome at best. I see in him a cookie-cutter amalgamation of modern celebrity, so then why focus on him? Why construct a biopic as well as a family tree on a guy who defines dull? Arthur's wives on the other hand are very interesting and so is Kirsten, so maybe the author is better at writing female characters. There are some contradictory aspects that just seem to be a bit too glaring. One example is the dagger tattoos. Here is an author who makes such a strong argument against triviality of modernity and the emptiness of vanity, but feels the need to revert to prison-yard logic for keeping track of how many people the dangerous thespians have killed...c'mon, really...at least come up with a better mechanism, because anyone capable of making tattoos would be one one powerful person in the post-flu world, probably even more powerful than the blond prophet.These minor details aside, Station Eleven was the best book I have read thus far this summer. Recommended!

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read!!

E.E. · September 22, 2024

This was a great read. I definitely enjoyed my time inside this book. It jumps back and forth, in time and between characters, which creates a vibe that fits the story perfectly. The story and the characters were excellently crafted.Highly recommend this to post apocalypse fans and really anyone who enjoys stories you get sucked into.

G-T-F-O. I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO ENTICED BY ANOTHER WRITER'S MIND. EMILY ST.JOHN-MANDEL IS SEXY!

E.R. · April 30, 2023

The book DID end up being every bit as masterful as the HBO series based on it, which I absolutely, immediately adored, and I look forward very much to reading Sea of Tranquility next. Emily St. John-Mandel's mind, her narration, her attitude, her ability to empathize in writing and convey emotions the rest of us have difficulty describing, and what's more, to attribute them to the sorts of nuances too subtle for some of us to perceive without her help. Clearly the work of a beautiful mind that has been allowed to idle creatively and introspectively. I hadn't received a literary spark like this since I first read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.I stumbled across the show on HBO. From the very first few minutes I could tell this was the work of a BRILLIANT writer, and immediately wondered if the book was the reason for this, or if the screenwriters were simply very gifted, so decided to give the book a gander and see for myself. As evidenced in the overall quality of the concept, my guess was right on, and this was immediately one of the most engaging writers I had read in possibly an entire generation, at least insofar as novels go. Emily St.John-Mandel says what she has to say FEARLESSLY, with conviction, and without mincing words. I would be very curious to see how many drafts she wrote, as I wouldn't expect their to be many, with the writing coming at you raw, like, DARE I EVEN SAY? HEMMINGWAY?! Her mind is keen, and she knows exactly how many words she needs to bring you into her next thought, and somehow skips along her discontinuous narrative without losing you, at a rate that would set off alarms for other writers like the wheels were going to come off. A dancer no less, to be sure, in real life. Really? Fitting the way her prose dances across the page, from her mind into yours, without undue modesty. Clearly she wants to connect her thoughts to yours, and she chooses her words appropriately to that purpose. BRAVO! Now THIS is what SEXY writing looks like, and scratches the sci-fi/post-apoc itch no less!

Excelente libro!

A. · November 12, 2021

Me encantó este libro, a pesar de ser una distopía guarda esperanza, amor, suspenso, de todo. Varias historias unidas por un mismo hilo, y dadas las circunstancias actuales de pandemia, uno puede evitar quedar agradecido, podía haber sido peor.

Gayet keyifli

f.C.(. · September 10, 2024

Çok karmaşık değil ama yetişkinler için bir post apokaliptik macera kitabı, kronolojik gitmemesi kitabın çok hoş, dili de ağır değil.

Station Eleven

P. · May 20, 2024

What was before and what came after: a post-apocalyptic world where art, culture, kindness and nostalgia can offer hope to make a new future. This book will stay with me far longer than other novels I have read and made me reminiscent of Heller’s The Dog Stars, yet another wonderful page-turner.

Fantástico

S. · March 15, 2024

La caracterización de los personajes es impecable y el cierre de la trama,incluso con varias líneas temporales, es perfecto. Me ha encantado

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Station Eleven: A Novel (National Book Award Finalist)

Name: Station Eleven: A Novel (National Book Award Finalist)
Brand: Vintage
SKU: U0804172447
Price: 7.53 BHD
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Rating: 4.3 (8 reviews)

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