Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility; The Glass Hotel; Station Eleven) ponders the fine line between chaos and control--and between one world and another--in Exit Party, a smart and complex mind-bender of a novel.
In a near-future Los Angeles, Ari reluctantly agrees to accompany her roommate to a nearby house party. This would be routine enough, except the party is Ari's first after serving 18 years in prison, and house parties have been an impossibility for years because of citywide curfews following the collapse of the former United States. Even amid all that, the party still feels off: doubles of some partygoers appear without explanation and the party's host, Kareem, vanishes without a trace.
Ari's journey takes her across the fractured states, and Exit Party asks how people hold on--as individuals and as collectives--through upheaval, change, and loss. Mandel probes further with thorny questions: What if that years-ago party was not just a party but somehow a door--one that opened one way and spit out two doppelgängers before disappearing Kareem into a parallel place. In this alternate United States, there are no private militias or independent states; instead, there is a unified, fascist force with a powerful surveillance network, two Kareems, and a missing physicist or two.
These layers upon layers of what-ifs and what-could-bes make Exit Party as thought provoking as it is immersive. With her characteristic literary skill, Mandel invites readers to consider whom they might choose to be at the end of the world as they know it--and at what cost to their individual and shared humanity. --Kerry McHugh, Textus Collective