Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I decided to read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel after hearing it was to become a TV show. I’m always on the lookout for decent literature, and if it’s good enough for an HBO adaptation, it’s good enough for me.

I found Station Eleven to a be a haunting book. It’s short, but manages to cram a lot in, despite not much happening at all, and I’d find it difficult to say what the book is actually about.

It’s the story of a post apocalyptic theatre troupe travelling from one place to another over a period of two weeks or so, twenty years after a devastating pandemic has killed off 99.999% of humanity. But that’s not what it’s about.

It’s the story of a set of comic books kept and carried by one the protagonists, how they came into being, and how they ended up with her. Kind of.

It’s the story of a vain and homesick actor, and the people around him. Maybe?

More than anything else, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel is an exhortation to relish the present, and enjoy the world we live in now - because you never know when it will disappear in a cloud of flu virus.