Station Eleven is probably the most ‘optimistic’ and captivating post-apocalyptic novel I’ve read. It is probably because it deviates from the usual bleakness, desolation, and cruelty so many of those novels focus on. The story begins with the death of an actor, Arthur Leander, on the eve of the outbreak of Georgia flu, which soon kills most of the world’s population.
From then on we move back and forth between the time before and after the pandemic following a number of characters somehow connected through Arthur. It’s not the characters, however, that stayed with me after I finished the book. It is the world, which the Canadian novelist, Emily St. John Mandel describes in such detail, she makes it feel terrifyingly real.
