Station Eleven

Paperback, 352 pages

Published April 10, 2017 by Harper Perennial.

ISBN:
978-1-4434-3487-4
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5 stars (9 reviews)

The international publishing sensation now available in paperback: an audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition, set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse

One snowy night, a famous Hollywood actor dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend and a young actress with the Travelling Symphony caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the …

6 editions

Gripping Read

5 stars

This was recommended to me and I went in knowing very little about it.

I found it to be a really gripping novel; hard to put down. I was really excited to see how the characters lives intersected and how they handled the trauma of the devastating pandemic.

The book tells the story of the characters at various stages of their lives ranging from many years before the pandemic, to around 20 years after. This gives a really interesting perspective on the characters, and keeps the pace of the book fast and interesting.

Highly recommended!

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

There was a lot in this I really enjoyed. Interesting characters and a fascinating set of situations, all very tightly plotted and woven together in a system that slowly became visible throughout the novel. The structure and style of it has a lot of similarities to The Passage - something the book slyly acknowledges at one point.
However, I can only give this four and not five stars because the ending - or, more accurately, the climactic point of the narrative - feels too short and brief, almost perfunctory in the way it happens. When I was getting towards the end, I was thinking that I'd missed something in the blurb and this was just the first book of a pair or a series. There was enough going on and being built up I couldn't see how it could be resolved in that space - and I'm not sure it …

Suspenseful, Meditative, Apocalyptic

5 stars

I wasn't sure I wanted to read (listen to) a book with the premise "What if COVID19, but much much worse",. but I'm glad I did.

The best speculative fiction is often a vehicle for commentary on contemporary life, and this book definitely is that, both on big themes, and perhaps more interestingly on the quirks and foibles of life in the 21st century.

The characters are nicely drawn and interesting. In a strange feat, I am now a fan of a fictional comic book series that I have only heard someone describe.

There was enough suspense and plot to keep me interested, without indulging in an excess of action. There some slightly implausible coincidences, but they don't drive the plot, but serve more like decoration.

It was fine

3 stars

Listened to this on audiobook, which it was pretty good for. I wasn't expecting much and therefore it met my expectations. I liked the structure of weaving together all the different storylines, it was decently well written. After a while I started getting annoyed at how useless everyone was after their tech stopped functioning, it's not like ALL knowledge disappears and suddenly people are like "huh, wow, I simply cannot fathom HOW airplanes worked?" idk.