Our new pick for our Book Club is Station Eleven, by Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel, an audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse.
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it
“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
“Mandel is an exuberant storyteller. (…) Readers will be won over by her nimble interweaving of her characters’ lives and fates. (…) Station Eleven is as much a mystery as it is a post-apocalyptic tale. (…) Mandel is especially good at planting clues and raising the kind of plot-thickening questions that keep the reader turning pages. (…) Station Eleven offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.”
– Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review
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, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 31 languages. A previous novel, The Singer’s Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
As always, Book Club members (meaning you just show up) will enjoy a 10% discount on the next book club title and on every item they’ll ask for at the bar during the Book Club meeting.
And so you know, we’ll also be discussing Shakespeare in the context of Station Eleven with other local Shakespeare-heads on November 1st.
Let’s meet up and talk Literature.
Price
- FREE!
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