Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel 2014

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
dystopian survival loss literary fiction

Our Take

The flu takes almost everyone and Mandel writes the aftermath with such elegiac clarity that survival feels like loss. The travelling theatre reciting Shakespeare to remnants of civilization is not hopeful — it is the most human and therefore most heartbreaking image in the book. Survival is insufficient, and she means it.

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