Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

This is the Common Read book for our university this year. We created a display around the themes in the book at the library, so I thought it would be a good thing to read this dystopian novel.

In the beginning, I wasn't that impressed, but towards the end the book grabbed me. Actor Author dies on stage while playing King Lear, a young paramedic jumps up on stage to try to save him, an 8-year-old girl Kirsten watches all this happen. We follow Jeevan the paramedic through the early stages of the epidemic - he gets a call from a doctor friend who works in a hospital who tells him to get out, this flu is unprecedently fast and lethal. Jeevan purchases numerous shopping carts of water, groceries, and supplies from a corner store and lugs them up to his wheelchair-bound brother, and the two of them hole up. Then the story wanders between the past, present and 15 and 20 years after the end of civilization. Jeevan ends up being a doctor in a small community and Kirsten travels with a troupe of entertainers. They encounter a town taken over by someone calling himself the Prophet and end up in the Museum of Civilization.