Jeevan kept thinking about his girlfriend, his house in Cabbagetown, wondering if he was going to see either of them again. Cell phones had stopped working by then. His brother had no landline. Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall.
--Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (Alfred A. Knopf)
On the day that the Georgian flu reached North America Arthur Leander dropped dead during a performance of King Lear. Station Eleven flashes forward and backward to demonstrate what happened to the EMT who tried to help him, the little girl who was in the cast, as well as Arthur's friends and former wives and what their lives were like before and after the arrival of the pandemic. This is probably not the novel to read during our current pandemic, especially if one is a pessimist. One friend of Arthur's spent the next twenty years in an airport. Station Eleven is an imaginary world that former wife Miranda drew and survived to be handed down and passed around among the survivors of the pandemic, while Kirsten, the young girl in the cast of King Lear, became part of a traveling troupe performing concerts and Shakespeare plays with salvaged instruments and costumes. This grim and moving novel ends with a glimmer of hope, literally, as a town in the distance seems to have been able to turn the electricity on.
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