Connections 
 This book is an unmitigated pleasure that I denied myself for far too long. I had heard that it was set in a post-apocalyptic America where most people were dead, government had collapsed, and all services had ceased. Fine, but much as I had admired Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I did not want to read another novel about bands of armed survivors wandering a desolate landscape, fighting off others who would kill them for what little they have. There is that here too--but enter The Traveling Symphony, a ragtag band of actors and musicians that tour an area around Lake Michigan in old trucks pulled by horses, and perform concerts one night and Shakespeare plays the next. Emily St. John Mandel does not gloss over the difficulties they face; the actress playing Tytania carries three throwing knives in her belt at all times, and they all rotate regular guard duty. But Mandel also believes in the slogan painted on their tarpaulin (all right, borrowed from Star Trek): "Survival is Insufficient." 
 The novel has one of the most arresting beginnings ever. A celebrated actor has a heart attack in the middle of a performance of King Lear in a Toronto theater; a trainee paramedic in the audience jumps onto the stage to help him; a child actress is hustled away by her minder; meanwhile, the television is reporting the first cases of Georgia Flu arriving in local hospitals. I challenge you to read even three or four of the short chapters and then stop. Though you do have to accept Mandel's premise that the flu becomes a global pandemic almost instantly, killing 99% of the population within a matter of days. She has to establish a situation where any survivors are huddled in small groups far apart in a darkened continent, unaware of each other's existence, and totally unable to communicate. For that is the necessary tabula rasa on which she will begin to draw the lines of her great theme: not isolation but Connection. 
 Another thing that drew me into the book was that Mandel works backwards as well as forwards; as much of the action takes place in our own world before the Collapse, as after it. Most of these flashbacks have to do with the actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander: his early struggles, Hollywood success, the dimming of his star, and his eventual return to the stage. His may be a world of artifice, but Mandel singles out several individuals to treat in depth: Clark, his best friend from drama school; Miranda, the graphic artist who becomes his first wife; Jeevan, the paparazzo turned paramedic who tries to save him. And Kirsten Raymonde, the small girl in that rather odd production of King Lear, who is the one clear link connecting this group to the post-Collapse world, for she grows up to become the leading actress with The Traveling Symphony. 
 Here Mandel works with all the skill of a detective writer. Little clues crop up suggesting other connections between the two worlds that bridge the intervening decades: a paperweight, a dog with an unusual name, and some pages from Miranda's privately-printed graphic novel, Station Eleven. We get the sense that all is not lost, that there will be other links to discover. Over the course of the book, the two time-frames gradually meet, the flashbacks extending to the weeks of the Collapse itself and the difficult years immediately afterwards, as the novel moves towards a climax that will bring at least some of the characters back together. But again, Mandel is not sappy in her optimism. Not all the featured characters will survive; others will do so, but hundreds of miles apart. And these physical links are really only symbols for the most important ones: the connections we make with one another through simple respect and human kindness, and the power of art. 
 Mandel writes gorgeously but very directly. Her entire novel is full of striking images and dramatic situations. The plastic snow falling steadily on the paramedic and the dying Lear. A dolls' tea set carefully arranged for a party in a deserted house. The standing ovation at the end of a Symphony performance coopted by a local leader who turns it to his own ends. The last plane to land at a Midwestern airport taxiing to the far side of the field and remaining there for ever, with doors sealed. And, viewed from the darkened control tower of that same airport twenty years later, a distant colony of other human beings glinting dimly through the night sky. 
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 This is unquestionably one of my top half-dozen books of 2014, together with Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Howard Jacobson's 
 J 
 , Richard Powers' Orfeo, and Marilynne Robinson's Lila. A remarkable harvest, all well above 5 stars!