In Station Eleven a pandemic has wiped out 99.9% of earth's population. Normally in such a scenario we'd be reading something pretty harrowing - maybe something like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, where the future looks very bleak and lonely, but in this instance what Emily St John Mandel paints is a picture of beauty, civilisation is left behind, communities (in whatever shape and size) are reformed, and dark days are left behind.

Sure, there have been, and still are, bad things and days, but the overall message is one not just of surviving, but of living. A really beautiful book.

Although the premise of Station Eleven is nothing new (the apocalypse in the form of a world-wide pandemic which almost wipes out humanity), where it goes after that is something quite different.

Emily St John Mandel has taken this common theme and turned the focus on to the people; their dreams, aspirations, the beauty they find in their everyday lives, and a new generation growing up without knowledge of the world that went before, rather than focusing on any apocalyptic horror. Not that there is no danger or threat in this world, but without those dreams, hopes and people to love, what is the point of living?

As The Travelling Symphony's motto (taken from Star Trek Voyager) goes: survival is insufficient.

There is hope in this apocalypse, and much to love.

It's strange to think of a book where 99.9% of the human population dies as beautiful, but Station Eleven is. Although it is set in a post-apocalypse America, that's not really what the book is about. It's about families and what it means to be a part of one, and how you define them. This is like the antidote to The Road, filling you with hope for humanity despite the awful situation, not leaving you in despair and reaching for the mind bleach to scrub away the horrible images.