Station Eleven

The international publishing sensation now available in paperback: an audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition, set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse

One snowy night, a famous Hollywood actor dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend and a young actress with the Travelling Symphony caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame and the beauty of the world as we know it.

Critical Praise

Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac. . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to. — George R. R. Martin

Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn’t have put it down for anything. — Ann Patchett

A novel that carries a magnificent depth. . . . It’s a sweeping look at where we are, how we got here and where we might go. While her previous novels are cracking good reads, this is her best yet. — The Globe and Mail

Gracefully written and suspenseful. . . . Its evocation of the collapse of our civilization is powerful. — National Post

It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment. — The New Yorker