Survival is insufficient, is what it says on the lead caravan of the Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians traversing the treacherous post-Georgian-Flu world which has wiped out most of humanity and destroyed the human civilization leaving behind scattered towns and technological relics.

Station Eleven jumps across three timelines - pre, post, and during the apocalypse - following the lives of three people who by a chance of fate are brought together momentarily and whose lives then diverge into the past and the future along a fragile web, their stories bursting out of a single moment in time.

In a way Station Eleven is an ode to the amazing place that is today. Those who lived before the plague are plagued by the trivialities of the modernized world, by their empty lives and their failed marriages, and those after the plague yearn for the days bygone. The survivors of the plague find a great affinity to Shakespeare, as he too lived in a time when survival wasn’t guaranteed and even in those hard times he wrote about humanity, he understood that being human is more than just surviving. His Midsummer Night’s Dream and his King Lear bring them to tears as they remember of what once was.

The plot and the characters are extremely delicate. And Emily M. does an exceptional job at revealing the plot in just the right amounts to keep the tensions high. The language is lucid but uncompromising. It also uses very effectively the technique of a story within a story, as Alan Moore does in his Watchmen. The characters have rich internal lives. This is the work of a master.

This is a novel which manages to be poignant without being sad, it is humbling and revealing. It makes you appreciative of what you have but also urges you to look deeper. Because, after all,

Survival is insufficient.