“ Station Eleven,” the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. The over-all impression is of an author less interested in individuals than in manifesting a minor-key mood coupled with a hopeful, humanist vision. For all their disparate circumstances, Mandel’s characters can evoke variations on a single person: wistful and dreamy, with a competent, vigorous exterior invested in values such as beauty and goodness and working to surmount their flaws. (Although COVID-19 adds fangs to the premise, the novel was wildly popular before the pandemic.) But some of the book’s swiftness derives from its consistency-from a tone that never changes or breaks, slipping through your body like a pure, bright beam. It’s not always easy to pinpoint what makes a book “unputdownable,” what gives it the feverishly consuming quality that “ Station Eleven” has.

and Leander’s second ex-wife, Elizabeth, and son, Tyler. We meet his ex-wife Miranda, whose pensive comic book about a stranded astronaut, “Station Eleven,” falls into Kirsten’s hands Jeevan, an aspiring E.M.T. There, the seductive figure of Arthur Leander, a playboy actor who dies onstage of a heart attack, bridges far-flung character arcs. That time line has a clear, tight shape-it builds to a climactic confrontation and the resolution of a mystery-but Mandel splices it with flashbacks to the “Before,” our familiar, dazzling chaos of electricity, cars, and cell phones. The story’s main action takes place twenty years later, in the “After,” where a fierce young woman named Kirsten tours with a band of Shakespearean players, encountering agrarian communes and violent cults, keeping the flame of art alive. The book inspires the sort of voraciousness that it ascribes to its virus, which blazes around the globe in a matter of days, killing ninety-nine per cent of the people in its path. I recently reread it in an afternoon my partner devoured it on two short flights and a layover. John Mandel’s hit novel, from 2014, is the kind of book you gulp down in a sitting.

Station eleven novel