Emily St John Mandel's seventh novel, Exit Party, arrives at a moment when the American political landscape feels as fractured as the fictional worlds she imagines. The book opens in Los Angeles in 2031 with a gathering where doppelgangers materialise and guests vanish, then branches into two starkly different futures: one consumed by civil war, the other a totalitarian surveillance state. The novel was published in the US on 15 September 2026 and in the UK on 17 September 2026.
In conversation, Mandel articulates the central anxiety animating her work: the erosion of shared reality itself.
When you get to a situation where half the electorate disagrees on basic reality – for example, who won an election, or is Covid real? I don't know how you come back from that.This collapse of consensual truth, she suggests, represents the deepest threat facing western democracy – more destabilising than any single policy disagreement.
The novel's preoccupation with doppelgangers and parallel timelines reflects both a cultural moment saturated with deepfakes and Mandel's longstanding fascination with contingency. She has always been drawn to what she terms
the counter-life – the one where you took a different job or married a different person. The way that, if we made a different decision, we would have become a somewhat different person.This intellectual curiosity stems partly from her own improbable trajectory. Mandel was home-schooled on a remote island in British Columbia before training as a dancer, leaving school without a diploma. She worked office jobs while writing until her fourth novel, Station Eleven, became a phenomenon.
How did Station Eleven shape her reputation?
The 2014 pandemic narrative achieved a kind of accidental prescience when readers rediscovered it during Covid-19, transforming Mandel into a figure associated with clairvoyance. The novel has sold 1.5 million copies and been translated into 37 languages. Her subsequent works – The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility – became global bestsellers, cementing her status as one of contemporary fiction's most significant voices. Yet Mandel resists the mystical framing of her success.
I've had just a touch of that all my life. A tiny bit. It's not nearly as useful as you might imagine. I absolutely cannot predict pandemics.She offers mundane examples: a premonition that her book tour would feel unreal before it was cancelled, or an intuition to bring scissors to work that proved warranted.
Please don't write that I'm psychic!she says, laughing.
Why does Exit Party centre on a character from 16 years ago?
The novel's protagonist, Ari Waker, first appeared as a villain in Mandel's 2010 debut The Singer's Gun. Mandel found herself unable to stop thinking about the character across the intervening years, wondering what she would become after serving an 18-year prison sentence. The 320-page novel follows Ari after her release, positioning her as a kind of time traveller – a role Mandel sees as universal for anyone who survives enough decades.
If you stick around long enough, you kind of become a migrant from a different timeline.
Mandel is constructing what amounts to a literary multiverse. Characters reappear across Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility, creating a web of interconnected narratives. She notes with wry humour that despite this architecture, no Marvel adaptation is forthcoming.
How did the writing process mirror current events?
The composition of Exit Party unfolded with eerie synchronicity to real-world developments. When Mandel began writing in spring 2022, she envisioned the civil war timeline as a plausible near-future. To provide contrast, she created Universe B as a mirror image – a totalitarian state where citizens spy on one another and people vanish from streets. Yet as Trump's second presidency unfolded and the manuscript neared completion, Mandel found herself struggling to keep pace with events.
I felt like I was struggling to stay ahead of the news cycle in Universe B. It's been terrifying to see the speed with which the news cycle has caught up.
The novel's setting encompasses the aftermath of a second American civil war and the collapse of the United States, with a fragmented country made up of republics, city-states, and militia-controlled territories. The opening party takes place in Silver Lake after a curfew is lifted, carrying the emotional residue of lockdown – a vividly post-pandemic atmosphere that grounds speculative excess in lived experience.
Why does Mandel favour speculative fiction?
This is Mandel's third speculative novel, and she gravitates toward the form because it allows her to
talk about the present by putting it in a sort of speculative cloak. Sea of Tranquility, set on the moon in the future, functioned as a Covid-19 novel without the suffocating weight of realism.
Realism would have been frankly unbearable to write, let alone to read.By displacing contemporary anxieties into imagined futures, she creates emotional truth while maintaining aesthetic distance.
Her creative process resists conventional planning. She compares her first draft to a sculptor's block of clay – raw material in which the novel gradually emerges.
There is no plan and no outline. I'll start with a scene, build it up from there.She frequently encounters moments when the manuscript feels irretrievably broken, yet she has never abandoned a project.
I've always been able to change something that isn't working into something that does work.
How is Mandel expanding beyond the page?
Increasingly, Mandel applies her narrative skills to screen adaptation. She is writing the pilot for a television adaptation of Exit Party and has staffed writers' rooms, recently working on Netflix's dramatisation of the video game Assassin's Creed. Her schedule oscillates between coasts: roughly one week monthly in Los Angeles for writers' rooms, the remainder in New York, where she rises early to write fiction before joining an 11am Zoom call.
It's great in some ways and exhausting in others.
Her personal life has undergone significant change. After divorcing her husband, a fellow writer, in 2022, Mandel married photographer Laura Barisonzi in 2025. Their wedding, held at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn – a venue that has hosted her launches since before Station Eleven found its audience – featured an open book bar and her now 10-year-old daughter as ring bearer and flower girl.
It was just lovely.
What does Exit Party say about finding meaning in chaos?
Like much of her work, Exit Party insists on the value of small joys amid frightening circumstances. Mandel thinks deeply about this tension.
Maybe there's a way of even appreciating good moments because they're fleeting. That state of being temporary brings its own kind of sweetness.The novel does not offer political solutions or utopian visions; instead, it argues for the preservation of human connection and momentary grace as acts of resistance against both chaos and control.
What happens next
Mandel participated in a public conversation with writer Rachel Khong on 17 September 2026 at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Los Angeles, discussing the novel's themes of identity and doppelgangers. The book is available through Picador with ISBN 9781035081288.
Key facts
- Exit Party centres on Ari Waker, a character first introduced in The Singer's Gun (2010), and explores her life after 18 years in prison
- The novel alternates between two future Americas: one fractured by civil war, the other a surveillance state where citizens spy on one another
- Mandel began writing in spring 2022 but found the news cycle catching up to her fictional totalitarian scenario by publication
- The book is Mandel's third speculative novel, following Sea of Tranquility and Station Eleven, which has sold 1.5 million copies worldwide
- Mandel is adapting Exit Party for television and has worked on Netflix's Assassin's Creed dramatisation
