NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES

Finalist for CBC Canada Reads 2023

Winner of the Toronto Book Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award

Finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Sunburst Award

Longlisted for the Baileys Prize and for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller

A Best Book of the Year in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Time magazine

An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition, set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse

Day One

The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.

Week Two

Civilization has crumbled.

Year Twenty

A band of actors and musicians, called the Travelling Symphony, move through the territories of a changed world, performing concerts and Shakespeare at the settlements that have formed. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the world every hopeful survivor has tried to rebuild.

Moving backward and forward in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: celebrated actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan, a bystander warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife, Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend, Clark; Kirsten, an actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed "prophet."

Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the fragility of life, the relationships that sustain us, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award; won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award and the Morning News Tournament of Books; and has been translated into thirty-one languages. A previous novel, The Singer’s Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystère de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Emily St John Mandel's profile page

• OLA Evergreen Award

Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac. . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to. — George R. R. Martin

Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn’t have put it down for anything. — Ann Patchett

A novel that carries a magnificent depth. . . . It’s a sweeping look at where we are, how we got here and where we might go. While her previous novels are cracking good reads, this is her best yet. — The Globe and Mail

Gracefully written and suspenseful. . . . Its evocation of the collapse of our civilization is powerful. — National Post

It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment. — The New Yorker