In Mandel’s somehow lovely dystopian exploration of our future, the majority of the human population has been wiped out by the sudden arrival of a highly infectious, fast-acting and incurable killer flu virus. Cue scenes from every disaster story ever told (raiding supermarkets, holing up in a flat for months drinking from an ever diminishing reservoir of bath water, news channels fading out one by one, survivors killing each other off for dwindling supplies). So far, so zombie movie.

The unexpected beauty in this book is found within how what is left of society begins to rebuild itself among the empty husk of the old world, and the characters who are clinging on to it. Small towns of survivors dotted around the US are living in the slowly decaying homes left behind, on streets lined with stationary cars and killing wild animals for food, and trying to subsist. There is not the resource or leadership for any kind of rebuilding or development, even fifteen years on. The reader joins the Travelling Symphony as they wander from town to town performing music and Shakespeare to the scattered remaining members of the human race, under the (stolen from Star Trek, a nod to the book’s science fiction influences) motto ‘survival is insufficient’.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the things that have been lost from life, from the nostalgic ‘no more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below’ to the Lennonesque ‘No more countries, all borders unmanned’ to the practical ‘No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.”

Station Eleven paints this unimaginably barren future through the consequences for all of those whose stories interweave with that of Arthur Clark, an actor who lived a full and complicated life, and who died of a heart attack moments before the flu outbreak. We meet his ex-wife Miranda, the dreamy artist who imagined and illustrated beautiful graphic novels set on the spaceship Station Eleven, theatre brat Kirsten who hid from her unhappiness in Arthur’s dressing room, and ‘The Prophet’, a frightening product of his environment, using people’s fear and uncertainty to keep one of the world’s isolated towns trapped in his cult.