I've been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction lately, and it may not be great for my outlook about the world, but there's a lot of excellent writing on the subject, including Station Eleven. In the near future, an incredibly deadly and contagious flu variant wipes out the vast majority of the world's population, precipitating a societal collapse.
The book flip-flops back and forth in time, following several different characters' lives up to and after the outbreak. It's geographically tethered to Toronto in the Before, and in a fictionalized version of western Michigan in the After. The through-line of those two plots is a woman named Kirsten, who was a young actress in a performance of King Lear beforehand, and is part of a traveling Shakespearean troupe wandering the upper midwest after.
While performing as King Lear, a famous actor and aging accidental(?) lothario named Arthur Leander has a heart attack and dies, and soon most of the people of the world die of the flu. Mandel does an excellent job of weaving many storylines together, and there are several characters worth rooting for.
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