Station Eleven

Published April 28, 2014 by Picador, London, England.

ISBN:
978-1-4472-6896-3
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4 stars (14 reviews)

7 editions

That aeroplane!!

4 stars

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel is a different type of dystopian novel to those I have read previously. We jump around through time beginning on the night where a flu pandemic takes hold in America, moving forward up to twenty years after 99% of the world's human population has been wiped out, and moving back to well before the disaster primarily through the life of a Hollywood actor, Arthur, and his wives.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chillingly realistic pandemic scenes describing the initial panics, blocked highways and overcrowded hospitals (and that aeroplane). The restarting timeline as civilisation begins to collapse was an effective device with elements such as the internet vanishing after so many days, electric lights going out forever, gasoline becoming unusable after Year Five - did you know that gasoline has a shelf life? The idea of survivors just walking and walking resonated particularly well …

Gripping Read

5 stars

This was recommended to me and I went in knowing very little about it.

I found it to be a really gripping novel; hard to put down. I was really excited to see how the characters lives intersected and how they handled the trauma of the devastating pandemic.

The book tells the story of the characters at various stages of their lives ranging from many years before the pandemic, to around 20 years after. This gives a really interesting perspective on the characters, and keeps the pace of the book fast and interesting.

Highly recommended!

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 …

It was fine

3 stars

Listened to this on audiobook, which it was pretty good for. I wasn't expecting much and therefore it met my expectations. I liked the structure of weaving together all the different storylines, it was decently well written. After a while I started getting annoyed at how useless everyone was after their tech stopped functioning, it's not like ALL knowledge disappears and suddenly people are like "huh, wow, I simply cannot fathom HOW airplanes worked?" idk.

Review of 'Station Eleven' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A story about how people behave when everything is gone. Survivors in a post-apocalyptic world brought on by the Georgia Flu (LOL, one of the many things St. John Mandel got right) are tested as people. We are also afforded a look behind a much lesser Randall Flagg and asked to understand his origins. It's very well told with great characters and hard choices that make sense.

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3 stars
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4 stars
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4 stars
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4 stars
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5 stars