Exit Party: A Novel

The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches for answers.

Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.

As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL is the author of seven novels, including Exit Party, Sea of Tranquility, The Glass Hotel, and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was included in the New York Times Best 100 Books of the 21st Century list. Her work has been translated into thirty-seven languages and adapted for television. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

“An Emily St. John Mandel novel is always cause for excitement. . . . Another kaleidoscopic, genre-and-planet-spanning jewel of a book. I’ll let her take me everywhere and anywhere.
—Emily Temple, LitHub

"A glittering puzzle box of a novel. . . . [The] novel brilliantly ties the notion of parallel timelines to a political theme, positing a dark twinship between chaos and totalitarianism. . . . This is [Mandel's] best novel since Station Eleven, a cause for rejoicing among her fans and an inspiration for newbies to dive into the backlist. Both a thrilling read and a virtuoso demonstration of the moral and philosophical possibilities of speculative fiction."
—Kirkus (starred review)

"As ever in her own wholly original and singular way, Mandel offers up a completely compelling, richly rendered yarn that's sure to generate both major interest and discussion."
—Booklist (starred review)

“Mandel always writes with clarity and precision. Her perceptive new dystopian novel explores what is lost in a rush to safety; it’s a hymn to what falls when the center doesn’t hold.”
—Library Journal (starred review)