Station Eleven

Station Eleven, published in 2014, is a novel by Emily St. John Mandel, who is Canadian. It is set in the Great Lakes region, both before and after a fictional influenza pandemic, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award went to it the following year. It was adapted into a television series that premiered in 2021.

A famous actor dies on stage in Toronto during a performance of King Lear, and the flu pandemic that closes the world begins the same week. As the ambulance arrives, Jeevan Chaudhary, a paramedic who was in the audience, looks after one of the child performers, Kirsten Raymonde. Twenty years on, Kirsten is one of a troupe that tours the Lake Michigan shoreline, putting on Shakespeare and classical music for the settlements.

The book circles round a handful of people connected to that night, including the artist who made the comic books that give the novel its title, and a man who was in the audience. The narrative moves back and forth between the night of the performance and the years after it, so the pandemic is never the subject in itself.

Canada Reads chose it for its 2023 edition, and it can be read as a standalone story rather than as the first of a series. It is the author's fourth novel.