'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others . . . beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac, a book that I will long remember, and return to.' – George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones

The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again. Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened. If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?