10 Books To Read If You Can’t Wait For Station Eleven

A National Book Award finalist and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner, Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel is well worth reading — and if you’re aiming to do so before watching the HBO Max series, you’d better get a jump on it.

Theater kids interested in Station Eleven’s Shakespearean connections will enjoy All’s Well. Mona Awad’s black comedy centers on a theater director’s mission to re-stage the play that ended her acting career.

To keep their traveling family circus afloat, Al and Lil Binewski set out to breed their own sideshow freaks. Their most unremarkable child narrates the story of her family’s rise and devastating fall.

As an asteroid hurtles toward the Earth, a group of experts — including a NASA scientist, a CNSA engineer, a nature photographer, a poet, a UN interpreter, and a marine biologist — band together to save humanity.

A brutal and fatal disease can be contracted through laughter, making every chuckle seem suspect. In this new, humorless world, one young woman helps a girl search for her lost brother. But amid an epidemic of hallucinations and hysteria, can she be certain the boy ever existed?

In a post-apocalyptic near future where everyone dies unthinkably young, a 15-year-old girl sets out on an epic quest to find a cure for her older brother’s illness.

For 15-year-old Vern, the pregnant wife of a cult leader, escape is the only option. Now living in the forest, she hides her twins from the hands and eyes of Cainland — but to stay safe, Vern will come into her own as something powerful. Something monstrous.

It’s been two years since Wylodine’s parents left her in charge of an Appalachian cannabis operation, and at least as long since she’s seen Spring. Desperate, she packs up and heads out — but her journey quickly gets derailed, landing her in the clutches of a dangerous cult.

Find Me centers on Joy, a 19-year-old woman who goes looking for her estranged mother after a deadly, amnesia-inducing illness sweeps across the country.

Colson Whitehead marries history and fantasy in this inventive novel, which imagines the Underground Railroad as a literal subway system that ferries enslaved people to freedom. The touch of whimsy and heavy dose of horror will remind you of Mandel’s Station Eleven.