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On the Shelf
Exit Party
By Emily St. John Mandel
Knopf: 320 pages, $32
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Emily St. John Mandel touched down in Los Angeles just hours before she arrived at Botanica in Silver Lake, shirt crisp, eyes bright, not a hint of jet lag in sight. The night before, she’d been in Brooklyn, celebrating the release of her highly-anticipated “Exit Party,” which is ricocheting up bestseller lists. At Botanica, Mandel tells me it’s the best book she’s ever written, certainly the most complex and ambitious.
The book kicks off in a tiny Echo Park apartment in the year 2031, just after the United States has collapsed following a coup d’état, a civil war has somewhat subsided and the curfew has finally lifted in L.A., which exists inside the fragile Republic of California. Ari Waker — whom Mandel completists may remember from her 2010 novel “The Singer’s Gun” — has just been released after serving nearly two decades in prison and is headed to a party in Silver Lake with her roommate Gloria. The party is where things get weird. The author’s latest speculative dystopian fiction features parallel universes that explore alternate realities — and doppelgangers that stumble between the two.
Mandel is batting a fly away near her iced coffee when I point out that she and I met at a party in Silver Lake, just a short jaunt from where we’re sitting. At the time, I’d introduced myself by sharing that I’d received at least a dozen emails addressed to her, with the sender confused by another “Emily St. Something” and we share a laugh.
It was a few years before that Mandel had come to L.A. to bring “The Glass Hotel” from book to screen, a project that ultimately fell through. She lives in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, but had just begun a love affair with Los Angeles, and ultimately decided to split her time between the two. In 2025, the country was still reeling from the pandemic and an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol, which had failed. The author, naturally, was feeling a sense of unease.
“That was the starting point for the book: looking at the intense political division in this country,” she says. “And more serious than the political division, the loss of consensual reality. When we were kids, politics was often a matter of reasonable people disagreeing on policy, and it’s just not that anymore. Now it’s two groups of people who disagree on reality, and that’s harder to come back from.”
Mandel wants to be clear, though: “I’m not saying this is going to happen.”
She compares the thought experiment to climate science, in which scientists put forward a range of climate change projections. “This is what will happen to our planet at plus two degrees Celsius, plus three, plus four,” she says. “Those are scenarios of varying levels of catastrophe, and that’s kind of how I’ve been seeing speculative fiction lately.”
The novel’s alternate realities are split like a nightmarish LP — the party in Silver Lake pops off on the A-side where, soon, most territories will be contested, and militias and gunfire will become ubiquitous. On the B-side, Ari, who goes by her full name Ibari, is a high-ranking official of the Internal Intelligence Service, a ruthless police force of the totalitarian and surveilled “United State” where people are “erased” for infractions like criticizing the “State” on social media.
When I ask Mandel whether writing out these alternate realities scares her or helps her to cope, she admits a bit of both. “I think with a lot of people, I’m already scared.”
And which reality does she think is more likely? Again, Mandel fears it’s a bit of both. “When I started writing the book, it was so clear to me that we were in universe A, where the country has become untenably divided, collapsed, and we’re in the aftermath. But then, by the time I finished the book, writing about this authoritarian state, this fantastical scenario of masked secret police picking people up off the streets and unmarked cars was like literally Minneapolis and L.A. So, I had this feeling of struggling to stay ahead of the news cycle on the B side.”
“Exit Party” is Mandel’s seventh novel and arrives at a time when her readers have been side-eyeing her books as possible prophecies since the pandemic plot of her breakout 2014 “Station Eleven” became a global reality six years after its release. “When I wrote ‘Station Eleven,’ I was conscious of not wanting to write a political book. I just felt like that isn’t the point. I want to write about art and the apocalypse,” she says. “Can you do that anymore? It’s a really different time.”
Back when the Canadian author was penning “Station Eleven,” she was still working a day job as an administrative assistant in a cancer research lab at the Rockefeller University in New York. Before that she was a barista, she made sandwiches, and for years, she was a ballet and contemporary dancer prior to becoming a writer. The massive success of “Station Eleven” allowed her to quit her admin job to pursue the life of a full-time novelist and television writer, a move she says was terrifying.
“I agonized for a long time over whether to keep that job,” she says. “My family had no money, so there was just no safety net.” The job became a mismatch with her rapid rise, and while she was still booking the travel arrangements for her boss, she had a publicist who was booking hers. “I remember leaving work early one day because I had a photo shoot at Time magazine.”
During a podcast appearance, comedian Josh Gondelman passed along the advice another comedian had given him: Keep your day job until you can’t afford to anymore. “That was such an interesting flip of the usual framing,” she says. “When it gets to the point where [the day job] is costing you opportunities and potentially money, that’s when you have to quit.”
The leap of faith proved worthwhile. Mandel’s two subsequent books, “The Glass Hotel” released in 2020 and “Sea of Tranquility” which hit bookshop shelves in 2022, were both featured on former President Obama’s “Favorite Books of the Year” list. And now she’s penning the television adaption for “Exit Party,” which is slated to be executive produced by Emma Stone and Dave McCary’s Fruit Tree.
As far as Mandel’s dream cast, she says, “I think Natalie Portman would be an incredible Ari,” but quickly follows with “I can actually imagine a lot of people in that role.” Last year, the novelist and television writer staffed the Netflix adaptation of “Assassin’s Creed,” which filmed in Rome. She especially loves working with her own IP.
“I feel like with every book I write, if it isn’t hard, then I’m going too easy on myself,” she said. “I don’t want to make it sound like I’m making it complicated for the sake of being complicated, but I feel like you try to write the best book you possibly can, and that is going to keep on changing as you get better at writing books.”
Mandel’s confident her readers are up for the task. “They’re smart,” she says. “I trust in their ability to follow me from across genres.” And she wants them to know that as “relentlessly bleak” as “Exit Party” may sound, that’s not her ultimate aim.
Even in the worst political moments, and characters in the book battle through many, Mandel says there’s always change happening. “Nothing lasts forever — and there’s a kind of beauty and hope in that impermanence.”