Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel Narrated by Kirsten Potter

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The captivating story that has spread far and wide, Station Eleven is set in an all-too-real pandemic that has pushed civilization to the edge. Past and present vie for your focus as the intertwining narratives, expertly woven by Emily St. John Mandel, crecendo into a masterpiece that defies genre.

2014 National Book Award Finalist

A New York Times Bestseller

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
 
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.
 
Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in 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 pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, 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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Sigrid Nunez

Mandel is an able and exuberant storyteller, and many 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, and Mandel is especially good at planting clues and raising the kind of plot-thickening questions that keep the reader turning pages…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, 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.

From the Publisher

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

The New Yorker

It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment.

The Globe and Mail

A novel that carries a magnificent depth. . . . It’s a sweeping look at where we are, how we got here and where we might go. While her previous novels are cracking good reads, this is her best yet.

George R. R. Martin

Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac. . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to.

National Post

Gracefully written and suspenseful. . . . Its evocation of the collapse of our civilization is powerful.

Ann Patchett

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

The New Yorker

It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment.

AUGUST 2014 - AudioFile

In this haunting production, 80 percent of the world's population has been wiped out by a global pandemic. But that still leaves plenty of surviving characters to be brought to life by the versatile Kirsten Potter. The story could be confusing as it continually shifts between scenes before and after the outbreak of the devastating Georgia flu. Principal characters are fading actor Arthur Leander and those whose lives he has touched, for better or worse. Potter ensures that listeners keep the time frames straight and skillfully uses pacing and tone to differentiate the many personalities. She’s a riveting guide, equally adept at voicing women and men, young and old. Thanks to author and narrator, this production succeeds at being both bleak and yet hopeful. D.E.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171875138
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	475,495

Read an Excerpt

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.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Station Eleven"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Emily St. John Mandel.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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