Station Eleven
Station Eleven
A pandemic novel that is actually about beauty. Mandel asks what survives when civilisation falls and the answer is art, memory, and connection.
Survival Is Insufficient
Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel moves between multiple timelines: the night a famous actor dies on a Toronto stage just as a flu pandemic begins to end civilisation, and twenty years later as a travelling Shakespeare company moves through the remnants of the Great Lakes region. The people in both timelines are connected by a self-published graphic novel called Station Eleven. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into an acclaimed HBO series in 2021.
Reading Station Eleven
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"Survival is insufficient.
"Emily St. John Mandel · Station Eleven
Mandel published the novel in 2014, six years before the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic hit in 2020 it became one of the most discussed books in the world. Sales spiked dramatically.
The motto of the Travelling Symphony in the novel, Survival is insufficient, is taken directly from a Star Trek Voyager episode. Mandel is an unashamed science fiction fan and placed the reference deliberately.