An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie
days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells
the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be
savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered
outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for
art and humanity.
One snowy night Arthur
Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a
production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a
paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his
aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in
horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the
curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as
Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to
spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother
barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the
window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and
life disintegrates around them.
Fifteen
years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling
Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the
settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and
music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on
their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from
Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But
when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter
a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to
leave.
Spanning decades, moving back and
forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after
the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife
with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan
watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as
Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the
prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them
all. A novel of art, memory, and
ambition, 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.
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