I searched my neighborhood bookstore and the local branch of the public library for Mandel’s previous books - this is her fourth novel - and, dishearteningly, found none.
Mandel displays the impressive skill of evoking both terror and empathy, which I credit to her background as a mystery author. (I promptly put the book aside until I could read it from the seemingly safe space of home.) A soul-quaking premise, and a story that, I must warn, should not be read in a grubby airport surrounded by potential carriers of … whatever disease, take your pick. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, an apocalyptic novel about a world just like our own that, much as our own might, dissolves after a new strain of influenza eradicates 99 percent of the human population.
But never has a book convinced me more of society’s looming demise than Emily St. AS THE WORLD seems to crumble into disarray, our fictions suggest that we long for an undoing - whether to escape such horrors as Gaza, the Ebola pandemic, and Ferguson, Missouri, or to reassure ourselves that, however bad it gets, some semblance of life will continue.
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