Emily St. John Mandel · 2014 · survival

Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel, a luminous and melancholy story of a world after a flu pandemic has killed almost everyone, moving between the night civilisation ended and the wandering life of a Shakespearean troupe two decades later. The Travelling Symphony works a fixed circuit of Great Lakes settlements they call the Wheel - and the danger begins when they leave it.

1. 1
   Toronto

   On a snowy night in Toronto the actor Arthur Leander collapses on stage playing King Lear, hours before a flu pandemic reaches the city - and within weeks almost everyone in the world is dead.

2. 2
   St. Deborah by the Water

   Twenty years on, the Symphony returns to St. Deborah by the Water for Charlie and the sixth guitar, left there to have a baby - and finds the town under a prophet who digs graves for anyone who leaves.

3. 3
   Traverse City

   The Wheel is the Symphony's fixed circuit of surviving settlements around the lakes, walked with horse-drawn caravans year after year - and they know every town on it, which is exactly why leaving it is so dangerous.

4. 4
   New Petoskey

   At New Petoskey a man prints a newspaper on a hand press, and a copy of it carrying a review of the Symphony's King Lear will eventually reach the airport - the first sign, to those there, that anyone else is performing anything.

5. 5
   Severn City Airport

   Grounded on the last day, the passengers of Severn City airport built a settlement in the terminal and a Museum of Civilisation out of the useless things - phones, credit cards, a snow globe - and all the book's threads end here.

6. 6
   St. Deborah by the Water

   The Wheel comes round. The Symphony's whole way of living is the return - the same towns, the same year's turning, the people left behind collected next circuit - and survival, as the caravan has it, is insufficient.