Emily St John Mandel’s Exit Party enters America’s fractured futures

Emily St John Mandel’s new novel, Exit Party, begins in Los Angeles in 2031, where a gathering takes an uncanny turn: doubles appear among the guests and someone disappears. From there, the story follows two possible American futures — one shaped by civil war, the other by totalitarian surveillance.

Speaking to The Guardian, Mandel described the collapse of “consensual reality” as a major challenge for western democracy. The novel’s scenarios are literary premises rather than forecasts, but she said their resemblance to the news cycle became increasingly difficult to ignore as she wrote.

Exit Party also extends Mandel’s linked fictional universe by returning to Ari, a character from her 2010 novel The Singer’s Gun. The author has said she is drawn to “counter-lives” — the versions of ourselves produced by different choices — and that her books develop gradually, beginning with scenes rather than a fixed outline.

Mandel’s reputation for clairvoyance grew after Station Eleven, published in 2014, acquired new resonance during the Covid-19 pandemic. The novel did not predict Covid-19, but readers later found its pandemic setting prescient. According to The Guardian interview, it has sold 1.5 million copies in 37 languages, while The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility became global bestsellers.

She rejects any grander claim to psychic ability, describing her intuition as limited and ordinary. Her interest now extends increasingly to screen work: she is developing a television adaptation of Exit Party and recently worked on Netflix’s dramatisation of Assassin’s Creed.

For Mandel, speculative fiction offers a way to approach the present at an angle. In Exit Party, moments of fear and political instability sit alongside the small pleasures of ordinary life — a reminder that temporary joy can acquire its own sweetness.