last night in montreal by emily st john mandel

Of survival, too, and of hopes, dreams and a comic book. Instead it is full of tensions, excitement, memories, friendships and fears of losing ones much loved. And almost without the graphic scenes of violence such a book would leave us to expect. This is an apocalyptic story like no other I have read. Instead, the author weaves an intricate tapestry of lives before and after the depopulation event of people who at some point touched that of the actor, some intimately and others for only a few moments. We are spared the gruesome telling of the deaths. But behind the scenes a pandemic is growing, within weeks weeping away almost the entire population of the world.

It all starts with a single death, that of an aging, but much revered, actor, on stage during his performance of King was a stroke or heart attack - natural causes, anyway. She is married and lives in New York.Ī life, remembered, is a series of photographs. She is the author of the novels Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, The Lola Quartet, and Station Eleven and is a staff writer for The Millions. John Mandel was born in Canada and studied dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre.

Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander Jeevan, a bystander warned about the flu just in time Arthur's first wife, Miranda Arthur's oldest friend, Clark Kirsten, an actress with the Travelling Symphony and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'.Įmily St. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. Year Twenty: A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. Clarke Award 2015ĭay one: The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the Earth like a neutron bomb.

Last night in montreal by emily st john mandel