Station Eleven

Hovering in between a 3.5 and a 4.

If I had read this book a year ago, I would've just been meh about it. But because I'm reading this book now, today, in the tail end of 2020 - it hits real hard.

Arthur Leander is an ageing, has-been Hollywood star who one day collapses on stage from a heart attack and dies, just hours before the world starts to end from... a virus. A very rapidly-spreading flu virus that infects and almost immediately kills so many people that civilisation as we know it end within days of the epidemic beginning. Twenty years later, we follow Kirsten Raymonde who is member of the Travelling Symphony, a nomadic theatre troupe that goes around to pockets of people who have managed to carve out a living for themselves in the empty and battered post-apocalyptic world and put on Shakespearean plays for them.

The writing of this book was beautiful, wistful, and asks so many questions that are almost heart-wrenchingly relevant today - shall we say, almost prophetic considering St. John Mandel wrote this in 2014?

Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life.

... the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before...

Kirsten realises that the Prophet was quoting passages from the Station Eleven comics, and she starts reciting them as well - it could've been a really cool scene where he responds in some way, whether in quoting back the lines at her, or even just eyes widening in recognition, before he gets shot by the boy. It'd be like Kirsten finding out that this really weird, deranged dude is a tenuous link to her past and then having him snuffed out in front of her eyes.