Featuring: deciding to write professionally, dealing with rejection, finding an agent and getting published for the first time, the good and bad of 2020, living in New York during the pandemic, the terrifying mystery of illness, the conversation between Emily’s novels, Ponzi schemes, ghosts and the counterlife. The discussion weaves between Emily’s various books from her first novel Last Night in Montreal to Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel.
Emily St John Mandel grew up in Canada and now lives in New York. She has written various prize-winning books including The Singer’s Gun that won the 2014 Prix Mystère de la Critique in France and Station Eleven, which one reviewer likened to ‘Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion’. It’s a story that moves between the night a particular strain of flu starts spreading like wildfire and the future 20 years later following a band of itinerant musicians and Shakespearean actors. It won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and The Toronto Book Award and is of course even more prescient now than when it came out in 2014. Emily’s brilliant new novel, The Glass Hotel, is as The Guardian said ‘a portrait of everyday obliviousness … a tale of Ponzi schemes, not pestilence’. The thing about this novel and all of Emily’s books really is that they’re not just absorbing stories that are beautifully written – there’s also so many big hearty ideas within them, and musings about humanity, about who we are in the dark and about our dreams and the ghosts that haunt us. And all of this makes her books resonate long after you’ve put them down.