In her haunting, wistful novel, Mandel imagines the end of the world as we know it, and it's nothing like you're expecting. Hours after a famous actor suddenly dies onstage during a performance of King Lear, a global pandemic known as the Georgian Flu sweeps the world. In her signature style, Mandel weaves together the stories of five characters, featuring a traveling Shakespeare troupe whose members earnestly endeavor to maintain art and hope as they visit various settlements around Lake Michigan. ("Because survival is insufficient.") Readers' appetites for pandemic-related stories may vary, but rest assured this book is anything but depressing; I found it striking, sympathetic, and hopeful.

This is the kind of book I love: a compulsively readable literary mystery, featuring stylish prose plus a plot that keeps you turning the page to find out what happens next. I was so impressed by the way Mandel unfolded the story piece by piece, introducing us to a seventeen-year-old girl in hiding (with piles of cash duct-taped to the underside of her baby's stroller), and slowly revealing how she ended up there—and how the members of the old high school musical group the Lola Quartet are connected to her disappearance. Set in muggy South Florida, the story is dripping with atmosphere and has a noir feel.

I loved Station Eleven and The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel.

The Singer's Gun was Emily St. John Mandel's second novel, published in 2010. In fact, Mandel said she wrote Station Eleven in a deliberately different genre, because she was afraid of getting pigeonholed as a crime writer. She handles deceit and deception really well. In The Singer's Gun Anton Walker has walked away from the family business of false documents, when his cousin ropes him back for just one more job with a bit of blackmail (his previous "final" act of forgery was the Harvard diploma that hangs on his office wall). Anton is stuck between his new simple life, outfitted with apartment, fiancée, and an Italian honeymoon on the horizon, and what he hopes will be an easy price for his promised freedom. He counts the cost, and makes his decision. And that's when things get really interesting.

Emily St. John Mandel's signature storytelling style connects characters across seemingly unrelated events in this 2020 release. The story follows bartender Vincent on the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, who is running a Ponzi scheme, and agrees to pose as his wife until the financial empire collapses. Years later, an investigation begins after a woman disappears from the deck of a container ship. Part classic noir, part ghost story, and part mystery.

Emily St. John Mandel weaves a tapestry of stories like no other. In her latest novel, she picks up three main threads: an exiled eighteen year old who hears an unusual sound while trekking the Canadian forest, an author whose book tour takes her to the moon, and a detective whose investigation will tie these tales together. We follow these characters from 1912 to 2401 in a unique story of space, time, art, and a pandemic. I was just as struck by the structure of Mandel’s work as I was by the character development—her books, while quiet and character-centered—are surprisingly propulsive. I enjoyed this mind-bending and utterly unique novel on the physical page, but if you adore multiple narrators, try the audiobook for a fully immersive experience.

Mandel's latest releases September 15, 2026.