I nearly didn't read this, because I'm pretty sick of post-apocalyptic books/movies/anything by now. I'm glad I read it anyway! It's a very human story, less focused on the overdone mobs and gore than on the inner lives of the characters themselves. 
 Station Eleven's particular end of the world comes when a flu wipes out most of the human population, tearing down the structures of civilization with it. No more countries, electricity, internet, and so forth. Mandel does a wonderful job of allowing the reader to see the modern world with new eyes, making the mundane into something precious to be savored. 
 The story jumps back and forth in time, following the lives of a diverse set of characters associated in some way with a famous actor, Arthur Leander, after he dies of a coincidental heart attack the night the world ends. Lots of different story threads converging in different places, tied together with a sense of fateful retrospect. Very well done. (Though, of course, I tend to enjoy this particular storytelling style, the satisfaction of seeing the pieces finally fit together - it's why I like family sagas too.) 
 Much is made of the importance of finding meaning and beauty in daily life, the ways in which people navigate (and are shaped by) trauma, the changes in relationships over years/decades. It seems to me that this is primarily a story about voluntary connections / platonic friendship - an emphasis I liked. (Romance in this book is only ever fleeting, fragile, or mentioned offhand; characters also rarely interact with their family.) 
 A few negative things: 
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 - Yeah, okay, electricity should have taken way less time than twenty years to return to the world - there are textbooks in libraries that could tell you how to re-discover that particular lost magic. I'll happily ignore this, because I felt the book wasn't really about the collapse of civilization itself. 
 - The prophet... the story set him up to be the Big Bad, but the conflict with him was anticlimactic. We never really got a sense of him as a character. 
 - I felt a little robbed of a more meaningful interaction between Clark and Kirsten. 
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