The people in Station Eleven’s post-disaster world yearn for the conveniences of their past and deride the depravity of their present, the linearity of their lives jumbled into a jigsaw. Yet for Mandel, fragmentation is not simply a structural conceit, but an essential tension felt by her characters. The book’s mosaic structure is navigable and inventive and sneakily builds toward unification all along, the fragments were pieces of a whole. In Station Eleven, her breakout 2014 novel about a pandemic that kills more than ninety-nine percent of the global population, Mandel imaginatively flashes forward and backward in time, switches points of view, and uniquely disseminates backstory without eliding immediacy or propulsion. John Mandel has an uncanny knack for shape. For an author who writes in fragments, Emily St.
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