A feeling of Cloud Atlas stirred with a little bit of McCarthy's The Road... add a dash of The Stand and set it all to a Bob Dylan soundtrack of lost love, broken dreams, and country roads, and you might get the sense of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. It stretches the edges of apocalyptic/dystopian genre storytelling like a rubber band. The writing is excellent. It feels real -- like maybe this really is how people would behave at the end, and how they might wind up in a new beginning. And there is the fact that she presents us with a new beginning, which in this genre of dire calamities and hopeless despair, is refreshing to say the least.