Station Eleven

Paperback, 352 pages

English language

Published April 10, 2017 by Harper Perennial.

ISBN:
978-1-4434-3487-4
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5 stars (4 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

Read almost in one go

4 stars

If not for food-, sleep- and toilet breaks I almost read this in one go. Harrowing and layered story that gives a surprising entanglement of characters.

Even days after finishing I still had ah-ha moments when I suddenly understood how and why some things happened and who was connected to whom.

Wish there was a sequel where you learn more about the characters. Some parts are eerily recognizable now we had a real pandemic.

Mind you; the book is not sci-fi! It is our world after a pandemic; no fancy, crazy tech is used or invented in the book.

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 …