Force of Will

IN THE winter of 2002 a young woman from a small island off Canada’s western coast was working in the basement warehouse of a home-furnishings store in Montreal. She had moved to Montreal with her boyfriend, but when that relationship ended, she found herself alone in a city where she knew essentially no one and wasn’t fluent in the prevailing language, French. Every morning she met a delivery truck outside the warehouse at seven o’clock and spent the next six or seven hours laboriously slapping price tags on martini glasses and arranging vases on shelves.

The job had one virtue, though: It ended early in the afternoon, leaving her the rest of the day to write. And write she did, quietly, steadily, showing her work to almost no one. Soon she moved to Brooklyn, New York, and kept writing for seven more years until her first novel found a home with an indie press in Colorado. Five years after that, her fourth novel, Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014), became a breakout hit, a National Book Award finalist that has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide.

The young woman meeting the delivery truck at the warehouse on those cold winter mornings eighteen years ago was Emily St. John Mandel, but she could just as easily be a character in an Emily St. John Mandel novel. The figure of the root-less young woman with few worldly possessions beyond a fierce intelligence and a certain relentlessness crops up again and again in Mandel’s fiction. In (Unbridled Books, 2009), her first novel, her name is Lilia. In her third novel, (Unbridled Books, 2012), her name is Sasha. In she appears twice, once in the guise of Miranda, the secretary/businesswoman who draws a limited-edition graphic novel about