Emily St. John Mandel is having a great month. Her novel Station Eleven (RH/Knopf; RH & BOT Audio; Thorndike), was just announced as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize as well as  a longlist title for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. In addition, a heated auction for the film rights were won for a reported six figures.

The icing on the cake may be George R.R. Martin’s strong endorsement. In a blog post, he urges fans to nominate Station Eleven for the Hugo Awards, which he says, “… are the oldest awards in our genre, and to my mind, the most meaningful,”

“I won’t soon forget Station Eleven. One could, I suppose, call it a post-apocolypse novel, and it is that, but all the usual tropes of that subgenre are missing here, and half the book is devoted to flashbacks to before the coming of the virus that wipes out the world, so it’s also a novel of character, and there’s this thread about a comic book and Doctor Eleven and a giant space station and… oh, well, this book should NOT have worked, but it does. It’s a deeply melancholy novel, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac… a book that I will long remember, and return to.”

Librarians spotted the book early. Station Eleven was a Library Reads pick in September and made the LibraryReads Top Ten Favorites list for 2014. It was also a favorite on several GalleyChats.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2015 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Awards, Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.