An actor dies onstage during King Lear in Toronto on the night a flu arrives that will kill almost everybody. Twenty years later the Traveling Symphony walks a circuit around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare for the settlements that are left, because survival is insufficient. Mandel moves between the before and after, threading everything through the dead actor: His ex-wives, his oldest friend, the paramedic who tried to save him, a child actress who was onstage that night, and a homemade comic book called Station Eleven that ends up in the hands of both a young girl and a prophet. It’s a warm book about the end of the world, which is why it lasted.
Station Eleven