Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
CBC Books | Posted: March 24, 2017 8:10 PM | Last Updated: January 25, 2023
A dystopian novel about a travelling theatre troupe in a future where the world has become a barren wasteland
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 theatre troupe known as the Travelling 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. (From HarperCollins Canada)
Station Eleven was adapted into a TV series for HBO Max. It can be seen on Crave TV in Canada.
Station Eleven will be championed by actor, director and choreographer Michael Greyeyes on Canada Reads 2023.
The Canada Reads debates will take place on March 27-30. This year, we are looking for one book to shift your perspective.
They will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem and on CBC Books.
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Emily St. John Mandel is a bestselling Canadian author currently living in New York and Los Angeles. Her other novels include The Glass Hotel, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Sea of Tranquility.
Why Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven
"I thought that it would be a book set in the present day. I knew I wanted to write about the life of an actor. I was interested in the idea of what it means to devote your life to your art. I thought it would be a quiet, literary novel about an actor in present-day Canada... but there was something else that i have really been wanting to write about for a while. And that was the awe that I feel at this world in which we find ourselves.
I wanted to write about this extraordinary place and time in which we find ourselves. and of course one way to write about something is to write about its absence. - Emily St. John Mandel
"We are surrounded by a level of infrastructure and technology that at any other point in human history would have seemed absolutely miraculous. I wanted to write about this extraordinary place and time in which we find ourselves. and of course one way to write about something is to write about its absence. I was thinking about Station Eleven as a love letter to the modern world, written in the form of a requiem."