NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST • Set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. • Now an original series on HBO Max. • Over one million copies sold! One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!

The room basically agreed the Station Eleven was a better novel than Glass Hotel. Mostly, that revolved around the fact that it was a work of genre fiction. Since Mandel had a smart plot device of a world-destroying plague that all the characters survived, it gave her a nice way of creating believable connections, provided an excuse for dramatic personality shifts, and justified a history and context that's more sketched than fully drawn. In other words, we just felt that Mandel's style worked much better in this genre work than in her more literary attempt in the latter novel. In particular, we really like the relationships between the characters. Their idiosyncracies and the way they particularly relied on each other felt very real to us. The setting was a mixed bag for us. Some of us felt the bleakness of the post-apocalyptic world was too violent and antisocial, but many of argued that independent of any reality of what a world ending event might be, FICTION of the apocalypse is unrelenting negative on human comity and generocity, so by contrast, Mandel's take on it was a breath of fresh air. Mandel has some very good writing in this book, both in the gestures to the terror of the plague and in the characters' memories and vague references to the violence that followed. But the plot was just to convenient. Everyone read the same comic? All the main mover in the troupe and the cult are actually related? It all came together too easily and gimmicky. But that was a minor flaw in an otherwise fresh and compelling take on a pandemic and the world after.