This is not a happy book, but it is gently reassuring, and it repeatedly reminds us that ‘Survival is Insufficient’.
It's a tribute to the quality of the storytelling here that I have continued to think about elements of the story in the weeks since reading it. While the narrative arcs back and forth between characters, times and places both pre- and post-pandemic, the connections are subtly and sometimes surprisingly revealed. It’s a book about human connection, even where that connection is tangential, and about the importance of the things ‘beyond survival’ that bind us together. The reactions of the protagonists and the world around them feel very real, even down to the bulk-buying of toilet paper in an early chapter.īut this isn’t really a book about a virus, or even about the end of the world. This could easily have been written during the first lockdown of 2020 but was actually published six years earlier, and other than the virulence of the disease and the vast death toll, nothing in here feels exaggerated. Twenty years later, Kirsten is herself an actor, touring Shakespeare with the Travelling Symphony, crossing dangerous territory to bring theatre and music to communities of survivors. That same evening a deadly flu virus arrives in the city, and within days the world as we know it has collapsed.
From her position on stage, eight-year-old Kirsten witnesses the death of a Hollywood icon during his performance as King Lear at a Toronto theatre.
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