Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel

Synopsis

DAY ONE

The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb.

News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%.

WEEK TWO

Civilization has crumbled.

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. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe.

But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild.

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 - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'.

Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, this is a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything - even the end of the world. 

Review

'We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all.'

What an amazing read. 

I absolutely loved this novel, it is incredibly thought-provoking, shocking, sad, yet also strangely uplifting at times. It's clever, inventive, impressive, at times chilling and haunting, at times heartwarming, and quite unlike anything I think I have ever read before really. I think I was unsure whether it would be a book for me, and I'm so glad I started reading it because I would have missed out on such a captivating, important book if I hadn't. 

The narrative is so beautifully knitted together over the course of the book. I was absorbed by this story, it deserves all the praise and plaudits it has received. 

I loved each of the characters - I think my favourites were Jeevan, Kirsten and Clark though - and I just loved how the author brought their stories together. Her evident storytelling skills and marvellous imagination bring us a frighteningly vivid and conceivable scenario for our planet's future, her understanding of the best and worst of human behaviour gives us an insight into a strange, unfamiliar version of our world, yet with common bonds of friendship and love, appreciation of music and theatre - most of all Shakespeare, cleverly woven into the story - , families and beauty, living on. 

By sharing these catastrophic times with the reader through poignant details of several individuals' lives, we can identify with them, and the momentous changes are almost given more impact through the small yet devastating details we learn (I hope that makes sense). So when I read 'Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out. There was a stupid moment or two when he stood near the front door, flipping the light switches. On/off, on/off', I knew that this small thing, an action we all do so many times per day, was actually huge, life-changing, now, because that was the last time, because the power was gone, full stop. 

It’s an extremely memorable book. The characters and some of the circumstances are still vividly in my mind now and it feels like they'll be there for some time to come. For me it was a page-turner yet I did actually sometimes put it down because I wanted to savour it, and to save some of it a bit longer; I didn't want the experience of reading it to be over too quickly.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the book even when I wasn't reading it though; I was either thinking about the situations one or the other of the characters were in, or thinking about how I might feel if I actually was one of them. I don't want to say much about what happens or how things change because you need to discover that as you read, but I was particularly fascinated by the airport and life there after the pandemic, as well as life on the road for the Travelling Symphony, and for Jeevan. 

It's beyond hard to comprehend the level of devastation that has occurred in the world of this story, to image a life continuing without so very many of the people and things that we treasure. 

It really made me think about our lives and our world, it made me appreciate a lot of things in the world anew - definitely a good thing - and it beautifully highlights what is most important to humanity. 

I don't think I can get anywhere near doing it justice, please do try it though and don't be put off by the 'dystopian' tag - I am not a reader of post-apocalyptic fiction, or anything particularly futuristic, but I thought this was amazingly good. If this review comes off as overly enthusiastic it's because that's how I feel about this book. 

I love the cover design too. It was really hard to know what to read next after this book because it was superlative in so many ways, everything else seemed not quite right for a while afterwards.

Just a superb, brilliant book and one of my absolute favourite reads this year so far. 

~~~~~

Reviews by other bloggers: Curiosity Killed the Bookworm | For Winter Nights | Pamreader | Sarah's Book Shelves | Lit Nerd |

The One Plus One - Jojo Moyes

Jess Thomas is a single mum, working hard both as a cleaner and barmaid to make ends meet, caring for her young daughter Tanzie, a prodigious maths talent, and for shy bullied teenager Nicky, her absent husband’s son from a previous relationship, to whom Jess is the nearest thing to a stable parent. Affluent Ed Nicholls has a high flying career running a very successful software company with University friend Ronan, but an unfortunate encounter with a woman from his past is about to bring Ed’s world crashing down around him. Jess and Ed’s paths are destined to collide; what is surprising, funny, poignant and uplifting is how wonderfully this plays out.

I devoured this new tale from Jojo Moyes, it was a real delight to read. By turns a funny, sweet, honest and tender portrait of modern life in Britain; concerned with families, work, money and the lack of it, insider trading, and ultimately, heartfelt romantic love. It feels that this author lives and breathes her characters; the result is they feel so vivid, rounded and real to the reader; a sense greatened by including some chapters from each of four different perspectives. All five of the main protagonists are beautifully drawn, youngsters Tanzie and Nicky in particular. And Norman the dog is adorable! Aspects of the scenario reminded me a little of the lovely film Little Miss Sunshine.

Jojo Moyes has written another absolute winner here – marvellous, eloquent modern fiction.

Source - Lovereading Review Panel
Published by Penguin - 27th February 2014
View other reviews on Lovereading 
Visit the author's website here and find her on twitter here

Welcome to Biscuit Land: A Year in the life of Touretteshero - Jessica Thom, foreword by Stephen Fry

'Tourettes is a mysterious neurological condition. Having it means I make movements and noises I can't control - these are called tics. Sometimes they're simple and just involve me squeaking or nodding my head. Sometimes, though, they're more complicated and involve me saying stuff like 'Sexually frustrated dog food.' And that's when it gets interesting.'

Jess has Tourettes Syndrome, which results in her making sounds and movements much of the time and over which she has no control. She is one of about ten percent of people with Tourettes Syndrome who swears. Welcome to Biscuit Land is an intimate account by Jess of her life over the course of one year. Jess set up Touretteshero, which the book explains is 'an organisation that celebrates the humour and creativity of Tourettes without mocking or self-pity...It's about reclaiming the most frequently misunderstood syndrome on the planet.' Jess proclaims at the start her account that 'from this point on Tourettes won't be my problem - it'll be my power. From now on, I'm going to be Touretteshero.'

Jess writes openly and honestly about living with Tourettes and about the ways in which it can and does affect her daily life. I found this an informative, honest and very moving account and found I learned a lot about Tourettes through the straightforward way that Jess has recorded her thoughts, activities and tics here. Her account is very readable, and I hope it encourages more people to find out about and understand Tourettes a bit more, which in turn ought to help further reduce any preconceived ideas about the syndrome. If you're wondering about the title of the book, 'biscuit' is one of the tics that Jess found herself uttering an awful lot at the time of writing. 

Jess introduces us to those in her life who she is closest to, who have shown her love, understanding and support. This book is not without humour and optimism. Jess writes of the friendship she has with the first person with Tourettes that she met, noting 'that those who tic together stick together.' She receives varied reactions and she always tries to engage in conversation with people to encourage an understanding of what happens to her and why. 

'I never know how people will react. There's not one group or type of person that seems to respond more positively or negatively than any other. All I know is, when I leave my house in the morning other people will react, and their reactions will be mixed. I'm sure this isn't unique to Tourettes, but is something that's experienced by people with any conditions that make them stand out.'

At times though it's very hard to read what happens, both in the way that Jess's physical tics can make her hurt herself, and in the form of the reactions of others to her tics, without feeling very saddened. As someone who enjoys walking, I struggled to comprehend what it must be like to want to walk but be in constant fear of crashing to the ground as Jess is whilst walking. There's one particularly unkind comment a woman makes when Jess is waiting for a tube, which is hurtful and affects Jess badly when it happens. I felt that what she wrote about this was very telling indeed and perfectly illustrates how people don't always think about what they say or do, not considering the affect it might have: '...the woman's comment had really hurt. She could carry on with her day and never be disturbed by my tics again. I don't have that choice.'  There's a moment in a bar, too, which made me feel angry at the way Jess and her friend were spoken to.

I'm really glad to have read this book, to have had the opportunity to get to know Jess Thom a little through her words and to have discovered more about what Tourettes is like through her open, moving and brave first-hand account. There's a lovely foreword to the book by Stephen Fry too.

Published by Souvenir Press

Thank you to the publisher for kindly sending me a copy of this novel to read and review.

You can follow @touretteshero on twitter and find out more here. 

Here's a link to a lovely guest blog that Jessica Thom wrote for Souvenir Press last year about the road to publication of the book. 

This is the first book in my new occasional series on the blog, featuring a non-fiction title in the spotlight.

Do feel free to join in from time to time with a non-fiction book review on your own blog.

The President's Hat - Antoine Laurain

'This is no ordinary hat.'

Translated from the French by Gallic Books (Jane Aitken, Emily Boyce, Louise Rogers Lalaurie)

It is November 1986 and accountant Daniel Mercier is dining out alone at a brasserie in Paris whilst his wife and son are away. What was a very pleasant evening becomes even more special as he is stunned to notice that none other than President Francois Mitterand sits down at the table next to him. His evening is transformed as he listens to the conversation at the President's table, and then, when he leaves, Daniel realises that Mitterand has left his hat behind. Pondering for a moment, Daniel takes the hat with him, and after making this split-second decision and putting the hat on his head, his life is never quite the same. 

On the back of this new and quite unexpected acquisition, Daniel suddenly develops a newfound confidence at work, sharing his views and finding the courage to stand up for himself: 'With unprecedented confidence, he watched himself negotiate the complex layers of diplomacy with the ease of a dolphin leaping through the waves.' ....'It was as if the real Daniel Mercier had finally stepped out into the light of day.'

Daniel believes that the changes within himself, the decisions he is making and the confidence he now has is due to just one thing: 'The hat. It was the hat that was responsible for the events that had turned Daniel's existence on its head in the last few days. He was convinced of that. Since he had taken to wearing it, the hat had conferred on him a kind of immunity to the torments of everyday life just be being there. Better still, it sharpened his mind and spurred him to take vitally important decisions.' Can a hat really have these magical, transformative qualities? What has made things so different for Daniel since his possession of it? What is it about the hat that affects 'a profound change...a metamorphosis' on the wearer? And what will happen next to the hat? 

This is an absolutely delightful, warm-hearted and magical tale about life and fate. I loved reading it!  Antoine Laurain has created a very special, mystical and entertaining story here that reveals truths about human nature in a clever way that made me smile and ponder as I read. Love, families, relationships, careers - the hat has a hand in the destiny of so many facets of people's lives in the story.

I don't want to reveal too much about the path that the story takes, except to say that the hat will transform more lives than just Daniel's, and that the story links together well as it develops and then it all comes back together very satisfyingly at the end. We are taken back to the 1980s and there is a some comment on the times then in France which I found interesting, alongside the step back in time to a place when technology was much more basic than that which we have today. 

The translation, with three authors taking on the different main characters, worked really well too. It's a really nice edition, with a lovely design and feel to the covers.

All in all, a real treat of a book and a joy to read.

Published by Gallic Books

Thank you to the publisher for kindly sending a copy of this novel to read and review.

You can follow @gallicbooks on twitter and find out more about this novel on their website here and on the book's website here.

Apologies

Life has taken over a bit this past couple of weeks and due to this and also due to the fact that I haven't been able to get my mind into the right place to write book reviews, I'm conscious that there hasn't been a new post for a few days, so apologies for this. I hope to be back as soon as possible with some new posts! I am fine, I just have a few different things I need to concentrate on at the moment. 

All the best. I'll leave you for now with this beautiful path that we walked on last weekend when we had those couple of warm summer days, pondering where it might lead...

The Dog Stars - Peter Heller - guest review

I would usually avoid "post-apocalypse" fiction like the proverbial plague - for me it's usually just too bleak and too brutal.  However, I'm so glad I made an exception for The Dog Stars as I found it utterly compelling from the first page to the last, and it moved me more than any book I've read in a while.

The story is narrated by Hig, one of a very small number of people who've survived a disastrous flu-like epidemic that wiped out most of the human race, at a time when global warming is also devastating the planet's wildlife.  Hig and his beloved dog Jasper live on an airfield in the Colorado Rockies, in an uneasy alliance with Hig's trigger-happy and sardonic neighbour, the aptly-named Bangley. Together they eke out an existence, pooling their skills to ensure their survival: Bangley, with his arsenal of weapons, keeps constant watch for invasions by scavengers, shooting to kill on sight; Hig's duties include growing vegetables for them to eat and patrolling the skies of their "territory" in his Cessna. Theirs is a bleak, harsh and lonely existence, pared back to the very basics of survival and filled with suspicion of all other human beings in case they're contagious or hostile, or both.  Hig, however, spends much of his time thinking about his life "Before", contrasting it with the spartan and often violent life he has to lead now and mourning all that he has lost, particularly in human terms.

In the course of Hig's sorties in his Cessna and his trek into the mountains to hunt we come to know him well, despite the rather terse and fragmented style in which he tells his story.  We sympathise completely with his grief and his guilt at having survived, and with his yearning for something more than his existence with Bangley currently holds.  In many ways while reading The Dog Stars I was reminded of Antoine de St Exupery's Le Petit Prince, one of my favourite books of all time: at the heart of both books are the existential themes of love and friendship, loneliness and loss, and above all the urge to find some meaning in an apparently absurd and meaningless existence.  Hig's pivotal decision to fly his plane beyond the point of no return (ie the point at which he still has enough fuel to fly back) is a last desperate attempt to find something - or someone - that will make his life purposeful again and justify the battle to carry on existing.  Of Bingley, Hig says "he had been waiting for the End all his life... He didn't do anything that wasn't aimed at surviving", but Hig himself needs more than this; he not only values the beauty of the mountains and the vital warmth of human connection with other living beings, but needs them almost as much as he needs food and water.  By the end of the book (and without giving too much away) Hig has found peace and hope and, although the ending is subtly nuanced with potential new threats that might temper Hig's incipient optimisim, overall the reader is left uplifted by man's ability to transcend his circumstances, no matter how grim.

In some ways The Dog Stars did bear out my prejudices about post-apocalypse fiction: although this book has many moments of great beauty and tenderness, there's no denying that Hig's world is a bleak and brutal one and there are a number of violent and sometimes shocking episodes.  From a stylistic point of view too it isn't always an easy read: it's not so much a conventional narrative as Hig's own interior monologue and is written in short, choppy fragments and incomplete phrases as he interrupts his own train of thought and changes tack. The lack of speechmarks in dialogue likewise takes some getting used to.  However, I became engrossed in Hig's story very quickly and found I got used to the stylistic quirks within a few pages. What's more, I felt the style really helped me get under Hig's skin and empathise with him.  These are his unfiltered thoughts and his raw emotions, and the style lends an immediacy and directness that heighten the emotional power of Hig's story.

The blurb on the cover describes The Dog Stars as "a novel about the end of the world that makes you glad to be alive" which is a pretty big promise, but I have to say it did exactly that and I have no doubt this will be one of my top 10 books of the year for that very reason. It presents a frightening vision of a possible future for mankind that, in light of recent flu epidemics and evidence of global warming, seems all too depressingly likely, and yet Hig's quest to find something meaningful, against all the odds, in his brutal, barren world cannot fail to leave you feeling there are some seeds of hope.  As Hig himself says, "Life is tenacious if you give it one bit of encouragement," and as long as there are Higs in the world it will also be bearable.

Reviewed by Penny Tattersall - guest reviewer

Huge thanks to Penny for reading and reviewing this book for The Little Reader Library!

Published by Headline

Life After Life - Kate Atkinson

‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said. ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean….surely things would be different.’

I admit I am a big fan of Kate Atkinson’s writing, having read most of her previous novels, with a particular fondness for the Jackson Brodie stories, my favourite probably being ‘When Will There Be Good News?’. I was therefore so excited to hear about a new novel coming from her and filled with great anticipation upon starting to read.

Life After Life didn’t disappoint me; I think this is a very special book in many ways. It is imbued with the sparkling prose and the dark humour that is so often evident in Kate Atkinson’s works. But this book features something rather clever and wonderful in terms of the structure and storyline.

The main character, Ursula Todd is born in 1910, during a heavy snowstorm, but sadly dies immediately, there’s no time for the doctor to reach her. Then we read that Ursula Todd is born in 1910 during a heavy snowstorm, and lives. She has another chance, another start at life, and this pattern, this unique quality, stays with her as she lives, and lives again, and changes the direction of her life, having chance after chance to get it just right. What a premise!

We accompany Ursula as she lives through many of the major events of the twentieth century, with her personal highs and lows recounted, then changed, as she has another chance at her life, and then another. She takes a different route, and a different course is set. Kate Atkinson writes of the personal experiences of one woman in a way that makes for compelling reading. I loved Ursula’s family and thought they were also all vividly brought to life, in particular her mother Sylvie. However clever the structure, I never felt distanced from Ursula as a character, as a woman. She endures some of the hardest times, the saddest events, and the reader grows close to her and hopes for better next time.

I wasn’t sure quite what to expect in terms of how this novel would work, but I gave myself time to get into the novel, through the early, often very short episodes as Ursula begins to find her way. I was soon drawn into Ursula’s life, her family, the events, and I was keen to return to them every time I picked the book up, little knowing what would await me.

When Ursula lives again, sometimes very little has changed, sometimes a lot is different. There are some thrilling moments, dramatic and tragic; then the reader realises that there is another chance at the story and can breathe again – it’s quite an experience reading this book. Usually after another go, things are better, but Ursula’s life demonstrates that there are always hard choices, difficult relationships; there is always some sadness, even when she has had more than one chance to live through a particular time. It’s a powerful and emotional experience to read this story.

This is by turns a surprising, unnerving, moving and rewarding read and it sets itself apart with a clever structure to the narrative and a distinctive main character who we live through different experiences with, over and over again, as we read. It’s a fascinating and fantastic concept that really made me think as I read. What does this mean for fate? What if we could all change things, or go back and have a second chance? 

Published by Doubleday on 14th March 2013

Thanks very much to the publisher for kindly sending a copy of this novel to read and review.