Station Eleven

Following the pandemic that destroyed our world, now left without electricity, without a thing, a handful of men and women remains, this travelling band playing Shakespeare and Beethoven in the Great Lakes area. If Station Eleven if a post apocalyptic novel, it's not a scifi novel. It's a fascinating story of hope, love and redemption, of what remains when everything has disappeared.

Emily St John Mandel's 'Station Eleven' stands out from the slew of dystopian novels written over the years imagining the fate of society following a hypothetical cataclysm. The novel depicts the events preceding and following the emergence of the Georgia Flu, a particularly deadly pandemic leading to the decimation of much of humanity, with the exception of a few clusters of isolated survivors in the Great Lakes region of North America. Mandel displays her finesse and originality by including characters linked to the world of the arts, a deliberate choice which helps to convey the importance of culture to define one's humanity in a fallen world where barbarity is a constant threat. All of Mandel's strongly humanistic message can be summed up in the unforgettably intrepid actress Kirsten's tattoo : "Survival is insufficient", a rallying cry to rise above one's past traumas and basic material needs in the aftermath of a wholesale disaster. A beautiful novel which appeals to both the heart and mind.