It’s been quite a week for Emily St John Mandel and her thoughtful, unforgettable dystopian novel Station Eleven. She’s been longlisted for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, alongside some of the best authors writing today. She’s been shortlisted for the prestigious Pen/Faulkner award , which called her book a “devastating portrait of the future”.

And now she’s had a public show of support from no less a figure than George RR Martin, who threw his weight behind Station Eleven as his pick for the Hugo best novel award. The Hugos are America’s top science fiction prize; nominees and winners are voted for by members of the World Science Fiction Society, so support from Martin is a big deal.

Calling the prizes “the most meaningful” in the genre, Martin wrote on his blog that Station Eleven “stands above” all the other 2014 books he’s read, and that he “won’t soon forget” it.

“One could, I suppose, call it a post-apocalypse novel, and it is that, but all the usual tropes of that subgenre are missing here, and half the book is devoted to flashbacks to before the coming of the virus that wipes out the world, so it’s also a novel of character, and there’s this thread about a comic book and Doctor Eleven and a giant space station and... oh, well, this book should NOT have worked, but it does. It’s a deeply melancholy novel, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac ... a book that I will long remember, and return to,” he wrote.

I couldn’t agree more. I love, love, love Station Eleven - I reviewed it for the Observer last year, shoehorning it into a thriller slot because I was so keen to tell other people about it. It opens during a performance of King Lear in Toronto, but the recognisable world soon moves beyond recognition, as a flu pandemic wipes out most of the people on Earth. We’re then moved two decades on, to a sparsely populated world where Mandel’s protagonists, a group of Shakespearean actors, travel between settlements entertaining villagers. It’s funny - the troupe, known as the Symphony, steals its motto from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” It’s also sad, and bleak, and – it wasn’t a total cheat to call it a thriller – scary.

So I’m delighted to see it getting increasing amounts of attention, and my fingers are firmly crossed that it inches its way on to the shortlists for the Baileys and the Hugos. Check it out, if you haven’t - tell me what you thought, if you have. It’s definitely one of my books of 2014, and I am looking forward to seeing what Mandel comes up with next.