The book by a Canadian novelist tells a story about people who were lucky enough to survive after the fictional flu pandemic named “Georgian Flu”. It’s a dangerous infection which killed most of the population in a couple of days. As in many books written in the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction, people had to learn to live in the new world.
I chose this book, because I like the position of people, who even twenty years later after the pandemic could not forget about the time with electricity, when phones and computers were working, when cars were driving and planes were flying. The characters often reminisced about life before the pandemic and had little keepsakes from the past. Like human memories, things keep their stories.
It is very interesting to follow how the author skillfully describes different times at once: the past and the present. She shows how people’s destinies intertwined with each other.
The main characters of the new world are actors and musicians, who wander from city to city and perform W. Shakespeare’s creation (“King Lear”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and others). In different cities, they meet abandoned places, desperate people, loners who fiercely protect their possessions, a group of fanatics and many others.
Although the post-apocalyptic world is full of dangers and terrible things, this book is not a horror story. The lyrical narration shows people’s feelings, hopes, memories, their humility and confrontation with the destroyed world. By reading this book we can immerse ourselves in that post-apocalyptic world and find out how the characters feel. Thanks to their life stories we learn to appreciate what we have now and understand why it’s important.
The novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award. It also was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and for the National Book Award. The book was made into a mini-series and premiered at the end of 2021.
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London: Picador, 2015
Check from the e-catalogue ESTER
Elina Slycko
Department of Literature in Foreign Languages