Station Eleven

Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Genre: Sci-Fi
Original publication date: September 2014
Book description: One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and 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 theater troupe known as the Traveling 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 Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

Thoughts:

This is the second time I am reading this book and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around. We follow a few different people in two timelines, one is the beginning of the epidemic, the first few days when it struck on America-Canada, and how they faced that. 
The last day of normal was like any other, we begin in a play, an actor dies in the stage, very normal and the last few natural deaths not related to the fast-acting flu that was just starting to draw attention. As soon as they leave the rather the first people get warned about the flu, and in a few days, the rest of the world is forced to accept the existence of the epidemic, initially, people were trying to ignore the news and downplay the deathly disease.

We are not in a linear, it jumps back and forth from the before the flu to 20 years after. In the new era, there is no electricity the people who remember the old world ache for it and yet those who were children barely remember it. We follow a group of people who adopted a nomad lifestyle, they are performers-main choice are Shakespeare plays. The world has changed and yet there are those who still look for certain aspects of the past. Each has something they look for be it old tv guides, news articles, pictures, old electronics no one will be able to use anymore.
At the same time, people behave absurdly. Moving around they come across all kinds of people some live in small communities adopting the best system they wish to and there is nothing anyone else can do about it, is each man for their own. Along their travels, the Symphony returns to a specific town looking for a pair of their members who stayed there a year previously, but things have changed. A man claims to be a prophet and took over the village, those who follow him act as if his world is holy and their belief of holiness as they survived gives layaway to awful behavior that people would have look down on. He takes any woman he wants, people who do not convert to their mindset they get killed. These people are very dangerous, as most fanatism is. The enmity rises between the prophet and the Symphony and they represent the main antagonist in the story.

If you are looking for a chill post-apocalyptic book this is the best option, we have found family, very few mentions but still a sprinkle of love, a "fight" with a tyrant, and yet it is not very scary. The aspect of the epidemic happens but as a backdrop, it is not the main focus of the story.
The majority of the time is invested in following the traveling Symphony and seeing everyday life in the new America, building new relationships, trying to decide what the next generation should try to keep from their old culture.

This book was picked as part of the post-apocalyptic reads and I really recommended it, even in the current situation this I believe it an interesting read.