A review by universeofdust
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

4.0

I heard about this book at a panel on dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction and bought it without knowing much else about it, but wow! The novel follows several different characters with each chapter moving between characters and through time. A portrait is created of a world before, during, and after a highly contagious and deadly virus sweeps across the world wiping out millions of people and civilization as we know it. The characters and their stories might seem quite disparate at first, but as the novel continues they become more tightly connected with each other, everything revolving around an old celebrity named Arthur Leander and a comic book called Station Eleven.

I love books like this that are able to move between genres and blur the lines between "literary" and "genre" fiction. The movement between the intense post-apocalyptic world and the world before the "Georgian Flu" fascinated me throughout, and I found Mandel's writing to be beautiful and poetic without dipping into melodrama and without compromising some of the grittiness of the story. Overall, a really good read.