With Station Eleven safe in Somerville’s hands, Mandel was able to turn her attention to writing her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, which hits shelves in April. “I don't remember if he cleared the Kirsten and Jeevan plot line with me, but for the record, I love it.” “He came to me pretty early on and said, ‘I want to change the setting of the show from Toronto to Chicago.’ I was fine with it,’” she says. When he proposed departures from the source material - like reimagining the relationship between the novel’s two protagonists - Mandel was happy to give her blessing. She and showrunner Patrick Somerville (known for his work on The Leftovers, another semi-hopeful show about an apocalyptic event) were friends prior to working together, and much of their creative correspondence took place over text.

Though Mandel found comfort in the knowledge that her novel was being adapted for the screen, she was fairly hands off with the series. Now, as the Omicron variant surges nationwide, the adaptation of Mandel’s tale about a group of theater actors navigating life before, during, and after a pandemic is streaming on HBO Max, offering hope to pandemic-fatigued audiences with its cautious optimism. “Being in New York City, isolated pandemic experience, it was really wonderful to know that somewhere right over the Canadian border, there were hundreds of people making Station Eleven,” the author tells Bustle of the hope the production gave her. As the novelist sheltered in place with her family in early 2021, her bestselling epic Station Eleven - a book that seemed to have predicted the COVID-19 outbreak back in 2014 - was being given the prestige miniseries treatment. John Mandel’s was a particularly surreal one. While there’s no such thing as a “normal” experience of lockdown, Emily St.

Station 11 author