The structure of this book is absolutely fantastic, my favourite thing about it for sure. It shifts back and forward in time, between characters and events, and Mandel is so accomplished that it's not confusing or disorienting on any level. Really excellently done. I only wish I'd been as enamoured of the characters as I was the construction. It's not that any of them are unlikeable - though as the central thread tying everyone together I thought Arthur was relatively bland - it's just that I never seemed to get beyond mild interest in any of them.

Part of that may come from bias as to their actions, which I found continually frustrating, although that's really only applicable to the survivors of the plague rather than those who existed before. Don't get me wrong, I really love the idea of a travelling Shakespeare group in a post-apocalyptic landscape, I think the concept is great, but the communities they all travel through... why are they all so thick? I realise in the immediate aftermath of the plague, people are staying away from hotels and other community buildings, but it seems that even 20 years on, no-one's had the common sense to go to a public library and raid the science section to try and get things working again. All the time it's "we've run out of fuel, woe is us" - is this an alternate universe in which solar panels just don't exist? Or water wheels, even? I'm glad to see that at the very end there's hope of electricity somewhere, and perhaps it's because I'm science-minded myself, but the great technological gap in this story - specifically that no-one even considers how to broach it, ever - is gaping. And yeah, I get that art is at the centre of the narrative rather than science, but if you're going to make that substitution I would have loved to see it made all-out, with reproductions of the Station Eleven comic, for instance. Which all sounds like a lot of complaints from me but I did like this book, really I did. And I'll say it again: the structure is a marvel.