Read it before it was prestige TV

One of The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century A dreamy atmospheric novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse. Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven is now an HBO Max original TV series. What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again. Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened . . . If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it? The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist 'Disturbing, inventive and exciting, Station Eleven left me wistful for a world where I still live' - Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist Station Eleven is part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

""In all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight.this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility." - Kirkus Reviews (starred) From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility--a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel With his breakout debut novel, Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established himself as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction, bringing late 1930s Manhattan to life with splendid atmosphere and a flawless command of style. Readers and critics were enchanted; as NPR commented, "Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change." A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery. Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count's endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose"--

A bold English adventuer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in a mighty saga of a time and place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust and the struggle for power. Superbly crafted...grips the reader like a riptide...gets the juices flowing! -- Washington Star. Exciting, totally absorbing...be prepared for late nights, meals unlasting, buisness unattended... -- Philadelphia Inquirer. Adventure and action, the suspense of danger, shocking, touching human relationships...a climactic human story. -- Los Angeles Times.