Arthur, a famous actor, and tabloid fixture, dies of a heart-attack in Toronto during a performance of King Lear. This is prepped to be some pretty big news, but it's eclipsed by the end of the world. The Georgian flu hits. Those who contract it die within 48-hours. Cities go dark. The internet dies. Civilization as we know it ends. We pick back up with The Traveling Symphony, a band of musicians and Shakespearian actors who travel from town to town bringing what joy they can. After all they've discovered Shakespeare (who wrote during plague years himself) actually speaks to people better than anything more modern (I'm a theatre person, as in, I have a theatre degree and have worked at major regional theatres. This is a perfect-theatre people conversation prompt). One of the members of the Traveling Symphony is an actress who was a child in the production of King Lear in which Arthur died. She has since become obsessed with him, scavenging whatever leftover tabloid fodder she can find over the years. When the Traveling Symphony visits a community where they've left two of their members the year before, only to discover the town has been taken over by "the Prophet." From there, things spiral forward and backward as pieces begin to piece themselves together. 
 This world is lush and beautiful, and terrifying. This is a dystopia, but this isn't the dystopia of YA, something that feels a world away even if it's providing commentary on modern society. Or a backdrop for a romance (I do love me some romance though). This is a nightmare. A medical pandemic. Complete isolation. The loss of all of our modern technology. People living in small groups. A kill or be killed mentality. Survival instincts rule the day. Living in places like abandoned McDonalds. I love how the cover (U.S. edition, see above) encapsulates all of this, showcasing the isolation with beauty. 
 The crafting of this novel is spot-on, weaving back and forth through time in a way that kept me throughly engaged, constantly figuring out how all the pieces went together. The prose in this novel was beautiful, pulling me along with the plot, while also deeply entrenching me among these characters and their emotional journeys. As the novel skips around so much, I consider this a pretty remarkable feat. I've just warmed up to one character when the focus shifts to another, although the strands interweave and there are characters we return to again and again. There is a character we meet at the beginning who I wanted to hear more from throughout the book. Mandel did eventually come back to him, but that I never lost interest shows how wonderfully she'd formed this character in just a little space in the beginning. 
 What does humanity mean in a world where civilization has broken down? Station Eleven gives wonderful portraits of people, good and terrifying. Those forced to make some hard decisions, those who exploit the times for all it can bring them, and those who are simply doing the best they can to survive. The novel forced me to consider what I deem important. What would be the pieces of humanity I'd go chasing down? What do you forget for the sake of survival? What are the hopes that get you through?