There is something comforting about Emily St John Mandel’s writing. Her stories of deadly pandemics and financial collapse offer warmth – like the heat coming off a forest fire. It was certainly true of Station Eleven. Mandel’s 2014 novel about a world-annihilating virus found unlikely popularity amid Covid-19. “We have this impossible desire to know how an unfolding disaster will end,” says the author over Zoom. Mandel, herself, downloaded the 2011 film Contagion. But she couldn’t bring herself to watch it.
Even before she was labelled a “prophet” of coronavirus (a label the author still bristles at), Station Eleven was a hit. The book sold more than one-and-a-half million copies and earned its writer the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of 2015. It was translated into 35 languages and adapted into a brilliant HBO series last year. It sent Mandel on an international book tour: seven countries in 14 months, some details of which she mined for her new book Sea of Tranquillity, a trippy sci-fi novel whose time-travelling plot hopping between 20th-century Canada and a colony on the moon defies any blurb. Mercifully, her next destination, Santa Fe, is a little closer to home.
