Emily St. John Mandel, the author who made a global pandemic feel achingly human in Station Eleven, is back with a new novel that asks a question we can’t stop thinking about. Exit Party drops a 48-year-old ex-convict named Ari into a year when a coup has dissolved the United States into regional nations and city-states. At a curfew-lifting party in the Republic of California, doppelgangers from an alternate universe show up and a friend vanishes.
The twist? In that other timeline, Ari is Ibari, a respected academic living under an authoritarian surveillance state called the United State. Same person, two radically different lives, both of them consumed by the same hunger for freedom and the same haunting phrase:“true diligence.”Mandel is less interested in political predictions and more interested in identity. How does the world around us decide who we become?
If you loved Station Eleven or The Glass Hotel, this is the fall read everyone will be talking about, partly because it taps straight into our anxieties about collapse, control, and what freedom actually costs. It’s out now, so grab a copy before the discourse takes over your feed.
Would you want to meet the version of you living in a different America? Let us know in the comments.
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Local Lawton
Local Lawton is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.