Emily St. John Mandel - "Station Eleven"

Amazing post-apocalypse story, after a pandemic "Georgian Flu", how fitting, has wiped out most of mankind, of Kirsten who travels with the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors performing Shakespeare for the few communities left in America. Great back and forth between the post apocalyptic scenes and pre-pandemic moments where she was a child actor, supporting a main character who is basically dead all throughout the book, actor Artur, his three (ex) wives and his friend and laywer Clark, who she meets at the very end, as he has been stranded in an airport since Year One. Beautiful character building and story telling. Strange to read during covid-19. How things we take for granted, are not. How little attention we pay the world around us. Jeevan lay on the sofa, entertaining flashes of random memory and thinking of things like cappuccinos and beer while Frank worked on his latest ghostwriting project, a memoir of a philanthropist whose name he was contractually forbidden from mentioning. Jeevan kept thinking of his girlfriend, his house in Cabbagetown, wondering if he was going to see either of them again. Cell phones ahd stopped working by then. His brother had no landline. Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall. As Jeevan walked on alone he felt himself disappearing into the landscape. He was a small, insignificant thing, drifting down the shore. He had never felt so alive or so sad. He bought another tea, because the first one had gone cold, and also he was beset now by terrible fears and walking to the kiosk seemed like purposeful action. Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn't noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn't yet known that everything was coming undone.