Exit Party

by Emily St. John Mandel

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.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Adult

496 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2026

About the author

Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 34 languages. She lives in NYC with her husband and daughter.

Reviews

[Maxwell]

I have read the new Emily St. John Mandel!

I'll write a full review closer to publication date in September, but for now I will strongly urge you to read her 2nd novel The Singer's Gun before you read this one!!!!

It's not a requirement to enjoy/understand this book. However, Exit Party will spoil The Singer's Gun for you, so if you care about not being spoiled (which you should because TSG is great and worth reading), then go read it first.

Plus, it makes reading her later books more fun because you can make all the connections between the characters from previous ones. Also I guess while we're at it, you should probably read The Glass Hotel first too, though that one isn't as strongly connected.

What the heck, just read all 6 of her backlist anyway because they are great and then you will be ready for EP in September!!!

[emma]

this is my new favorite book and i haven't even read it yet

[levi (starboy) (s.ia)]

Weird looking book here i come

[Maggie Stiefvater]

1. in 2014, Emily St. John Mandel wrote STATION ELEVEN, about a world suddenly plunged into a global pandemic, years before Covid came along.

2. In 2026, Emily St. John Mandel released EXIT PARTY, a novel where the main character listens repeatedly to Bach's cello suites, on September 15th, the day after Maggie Stiefvater's beleaguered cello instructor says to her "here's the Bach," as he finally gives in and assigns her Bach's first cello suite.

3. COINCIDENCE? Is this useful? Is this entertaining? Am I dreaming?

4. EXIT PARTY is, like St. John Mandel's previous work, a literary speculative piece, this time about quantum doubling, faint coincidences, vague premonitions, Los Angeles parties, Paris weather domes, and felons who listen to Bach's cello suites under stress.

Let these four bullet points serve as my review. I would write more, but I have to practice. This suite is not the easiest thing in the world.

[Ron Charles]

In this strand of the multiverse, the I that is me is not entirely sure what happens in Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Exit Party.

I can only hope this review is smarter in a different dimension.

But at least I’m being honest. Anybody who promises you definitive clarity on this mind-bending story should be regarded with the suspicion reserved for Instagram health experts.

Mandel’s work is where you go when you’ve wandered through the magic wardrobe and your green portal gun is out of fluid. Across six — now seven — novels twisting in the space-time continuum, she’s explored our most poignant struggles for connection in a world constantly shattering beneath us.

In early 2020 when the Covid pandemic struck, bookstores stocked with copies of Mandel’s flu dystopia, Station Eleven, were luckier than neighbors hoarding toilet paper.

How close are we now to the national hellscape that greets us in these opening pages of Exit Party? The year is 2031, when I thought all we had to worry about was Social Security running out of money, but Mandel calls it “the first spring after the collapse of the United States.” She doesn’t spill much ink on that dissolution, perhaps because we’ve been mulling over the possibility for the past decade, or simply because she’s always more interested in the personal response to disaster than the mechanics. In any case, it’s enough to know that the Union disbanded after a coup d’état, states seceded, “either alone or in alliances,” and a new civil war ravaged the land.

But now the international peacekeeping troops have withdrawn from Los Angeles, the city’s curfew has finally been lifted, and it’s time to party. Sure, there are still random terrorist bombings here and there, but that’s no reason to stay cooped up forever.

A young man named Kareem invites everybody he knows to his apartment to celebrate, and Mandel instantly captures how adept we are at translating calamity into tedium.

“So, how’s the collapse of the country going for you?” one guest asks.

“Oh, you know, could’ve been worse.”

Kareem is a gracious host. “His apartment was both cramped and glamorous,” Mandel writes. “He’d gone to some effort. There were flowers everywhere.”

But then there’s something amiss — just odd, and only odd if you’re....

You can read the rest of this review for free on Substack:
https://roncharles.substack.com/p/it-...

[Chad Alexander Guarino da Verona]

INJECT THIS INTO MY VEINS NOW

[Blair]

I think this is the author’s best book since Station Eleven, and I guess this is the time to admit that as much as I loved that book, my other encounters with Emily St. John Mandel’s writing have been less than stellar. I liked The Glass Hotel but can hardly remember it; my only remaining impression of Sea of Tranquility is that I found the stuff about the writer’s family annoying; and I was not impressed by The Lola Quartet. (For this reason, I didn’t read The Singer’s Gun before starting Exit Party, although I knew the characters were connected. Maybe I’d have got something extra out of Exit Party if I had, but I can confirm that knowledge of the earlier book definitely isn’t necessary to enjoy this one.)

Time will tell whether Exit Party will stick more firmly in my mind or not, but I found the beginning of this novel instantly engaging with its irresistible opening scene. In a near-future, post-civil-war, fractured USA, ex-con Ari is attending a party with her skittish roommate Gloria. But strange things happen at this party. To be more specific, doubles of some guests appear at the party; meanwhile, the host vanishes completely. I was hooked. From there it becomes a globetrotting story that spans several countries and two realities, sticking most closely to two versions of Ari, aka Ibari Walker, who, in another version of her life, is a detective rather than a criminal.

One of the greatest strengths of Mandel’s writing has always been her ability to bring characters and worlds to life with seemingly little effort. I found the futures of Exit Party convincing, but I particularly loved all the smaller and more recognisable human details embedded within them, the habits and complex histories between characters that make these parallel lives feel like actual lives lived, rather than simply routes through the plot. In the last couple of months I’ve read a handful of really wonderful novels and a bunch of disappointing ones, but this might have been the most purely pleasurable reading experience – the sort of book where the pages seemed almost to turn themselves.

I received an advance review copy of Exit Party from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Karen]

So this is unlike anything that I’ve ever read, but it’s my first reading of this author’s who has bestsellers as Station ll, The Glass Hotel, and others.
This story starts off at a party in 2031 to celebrate the departure of troops from Los Angeles and the lift of the city-wide curfew.
This was a post collapse of America that had happened.
The party is at a man named Kareem’s apartment and something ends up being VERY wrong. As Kareem is greeting friends and acquaintances, he starts seeing doppelgängers of many of them, but they are dressed differently and have different names from each other. He is so distressed that he leaves his own party.
We are then taken into two near future worlds running parallel to each other.. with the same characters living different lives in each world.
We are in the USA, Greece and Paris(which is under a dome)
Surveillance is everywhere.
It was very good but more sci-fi than I would ever pick up.
I believe anyone who likes this genre will really love this one!

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the free ebook in exchange for my honest review.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

It was a fascinating alternate reality to consider, but as I read through the three previous transcripts, I sensed an increasing distance and disinterest on the part of the interviewers. The man's stories were consistent from interview to interview, but the problem was that there was no way at all to verify anything he said. Still, his story lined up with Nico's husband's in a way that couldn't be ignored. This Kareem had thrown a party, and at a certain point in the evening, doubles of two of his friends had appeared.

 
I came late to the brilliant world of Emily St John Mandel in 2020 when I read her cult-favourite Arthur C Clarke winning fourth novel “Station Eleven” (dealing with the aftermath of a deadly swine flu pandemic and beginning with an actor dying from a heart attack in a production of King Lear) back to back with her then newly published fifth novel “The Glass Hotel”.  Read together (and I think it is by far the best way to read them) the novels were simply brilliantly.  “The Glass Hotel” in particular, alongside its exploration of capitalism and white collar crime with its pseudo-Madoff plot, is really an exploration of ideas such as shadow worlds, ghost worlds, lost worlds, counter-factual narratives, doubleness, parallel realities: and what really makes the books work so well together is that “The Glass Hotel” is effectively a parallel universe mentioned in the “Station Eleven” quote where the devastating pandemic does not happen, but the global financial crisis does, and with many other links between the novels which I have bought out in my extensive Goodreads review of both. Her sixth novel “Sea of Tranquility” (2022) takes place in the Glass Hotel universe and introduced both meta-fictionality/self-referentiality (with a character almost an author stand-in) and the ideas of time travel and of reality versus simulation.
 
I say world of Emily St John Mandel but really it would be more appropriate to say the Mandelverse – the by way well known way in which characters reappear across her books – including from her first three novels “Last Night In Montreal”, “The Singers Gun” and “The Lola Quartet” which were more the literary noir-thriller/detective novels than her more conceptual second three novels.
 
And this her seventh novel – due out in September 2026 and which I would love to see gain some Booker recognition, returns to many of the same ideas, very much exploring the idea of counterlives and even more explicitly parallel worlds (here both taking place within two halves of the same novel rather than between two novels).
 
It is also very much part of that Mandelverse – Ari Walker (Anton’s crime dealing cousin from “The Singers Gun” is the novel’s opening and key character) and the paintings of Lucas Alkaitis from “Glass Hotel” (one of which is directly from that novel, another of which takes its title from a chapter heading there – “Swan Dive”) are a key to the mystery at this novel – the second in particular forming a literal portal between two worlds.  A minor character works on the moon-based Colony from “Sea of Tranquillity”.  There are also some agent passphrases in the novel too that feel like they are taken from another Mandel novel – but I was unable to trace them.
 
The novel is I think even more explicitly political than her other novels – for me a key phrase in the novel is “countries don’t last for ever” and Mandel uses this work I think to point at the current clear fragility of liberal democracy in the USA and even the fragility of the USA itself.  Set in a near future 2031, it sets out two counter-states for the future of America, both of them though dystopian: one an America torn apart into warring territories and city-states (Mandel whose writing of course anticipated pandemics first came across the idea of America and her native Canada splitting into opposed groupings of contiguous and similarly inclined states with the varied responses to COVID); the second an America still united but only via an all-pervasive totalitarian surveillance state.
 
The novel is written in two parts – Side A and Side B which take place in these two different worlds.
 
It opens (Side A) in the warring America – and with a (titular) party taking place to celebrate the lifting of a curfew in LA following a coup and civil war which has ripped the country asunder.  Note that the idea of celebration (the party) and the importance of art (here in the form of the paintings) in the face of breakdown echoes of course the idea of the King Lear performances in “Station Eleven” and is one I think important to the author. 
 
The party is attended by Ari – who having served a 20 year prison sentence for the hit on her cousin Anton (which forms the culmination of “The Singers Gun”) has been released and goes to live with Gloria – her flatmate, a refugee from US militia wars, distinguished by a scar (whose provenance emerges over time) – and is hosted by Gloria’s friend Kareem.  At the party Gloria spots a woman who seems to change appearance and identity almost instantaneously and who seems to think she knows Ari (but by her legal and unused name Ibari) – and Kareem (who Gloria reveals is the father of her unborn child) disappears although not before Gloria decides to take his Alkatis painting “Swan Dive”.   And post party further complications ensue – Ari meets someone who is apparently identical to Gloria (other than the scar) but goes by the name Nico (and who also appeared at the party) and who in turn thinks Ari is near identical to someone she knows called Ibari – and we are in a whole world of both doubling and disappearance and Ari finds herself both detective and drawn back to her familiar world of crime – this time as a gun-runner.
 
A second first party section takes us to Paris and the now elderly, extremely rich and recently widowed Ari being visited by Sebastian pretending to be an art student but who she realises is the son of Gloria – albeit largely raised by Nico – and who she also realises intends to steal “Swan Dive” which she bought from Gloria to add to her art collection.  And from there we get her back story since fleeing America and her series of marriages, involvement in high end crime and also near death experience in a protest against the exclusionary domes being put up in Paris – but also in a short series of one sided conversations (at the time of the explosion) Nico sharing with her something of what lead to Nico’s sudden appearance at the party – pulled away from a different parallel world – before returning to her interaction with Sebastian.
 
And then we move in Side B to that different world – Marlow (a name we know from side A as one of the children Nico left behind when she came to this world) is called by her estranged brother to say that her father Kareem is dying.  Her father’s best friend – Ibari – Detective Walker who now in her seventies has worked for years for Service the all pervasive state entity which has preserved America (admittedly now with exit as well as entry forbidden) while other states collapse, comes to the beside and Marlow’s lunar-worker brother Samir is thrown by the appearance of an undocumented man living who not just shares his father’s appearance but his name.
 
And from there we get both the story of the state-defying and misfiring experiment what lead to the opening party and its series of doubles and its disappearance (and the reverse disappearances and the double in Side B) and how the aftermath and repercussions played out over decades in the Side B world.
 
There were some nice touches which built on and linked the core ideas of the novel – for example: the idea of death as being like a transport between worlds (with again the Swan Dive painting seemingly explicitly facilitating both forms of transportation); a reference to ageing as being similarly like migrating between different timelines and between the disorientation and world-navigation-difficulties that the characters who find themselves moving between the two USAs experience “There's the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there's nothing left of it, but you're still here.”;the idea of sudden transitions – for example as experienced between the citizens of the ex-US after the coup, by Ari (when being arrested, being releases from prison, fleeing to France) and by those suddenly thrown into or out of the party.
 
Overall I thought this was an outstanding novel – well written, an engrossing set of plot lines, a stimulating series of ideas and above all a continuation of what is rapidly proving to be one of the best literary projects of the English language world and one which I would love to see get the author some overdue literary prize recognition.
 
My thanks to Picador for an ARC
 

I sat out there for an hour or so before I went in, looking at the lights of the downtown towers. I knew this strange other version of Kareem wasn't lying, because of the tattoo he'd described to me, TRUE DILIGENCE on the back of Ari's left wrist. Had we had the same childhood, this other person and I? My grasp of quantum physics was weak at best, but that line of text, I thought now, was an entanglement between us, between me and Ari. When I thought of the tattoo, it was easy to imagine a scenario where I'd done something quite different, where Id become a criminal instead of becoming the police. Two sides of the same coin, I thought, and the inevitable next thought was that if I had become a criminal, I would have been good at it, because I was good at everything I'd ever tried in my life. It was an absurd line of thought. I. was very tired. Strange to think there weren't just two versions of me, and two versions of Kareem and Nico and possibly everyone else, but two versions of our country. There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray, and another where my homeland had closed like a fist.

[Henk]

This sounds so good, I am here for the new Emily St. John Mandel and literary takes on time travel and humanity!

[Liz Hein]

Exit Party opens in 2031. America is in a civil war, it has broken into territories owned by militias, but there’s finally some good news. The Republic of California is established and curfew is lifted in LA. The natural response is to throw a party, and that’s where we open with Ari, a 48 year old that just spent some time in prison, and she’s ready for her first party. The reader quickly releases all is not well. Reality doesn’t feel…like reality. We the jump in time and space to Paris and Ari is there, but things are…different. I think I need to leave the plot there.

If this book had no author, readers would still know it’s ESJM. We’re plopped into a strange world that feels a little like our own, but not quite. And we’re there *after* the Big Event that made our world a little stranger. We’re here, reading, not to understand what happened, but to understand the inner workings of our characters and how they’re affected by the Big Event. It’s about art and love and authenticity and family and the dangers of surveillance and puts the idea of linear time into question.

I really enjoyed this. Is my new favorite of hers? Probably not, but I could not put this down and oh did it make me miss my dad. Don’t read this for answers, don’t read this for thrills despite the somewhat thrilling premise, read this to be left a bit haunted by what makes you…you. I also recommend reading this when you can pay attention. It’s not difficult to figure out the jumps in time and the sort of multiverse she’s created *if* your locked in. I took some notes and felt a bit like Charlie in the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia man…I imagine I looked a bit crazed yet ready to talk your ear off. More to come closer to pub date!

[Liana Gold]

Los Ángeles, 2031. United States has collapsed. California is its own republic. 48 year old, Ari has just been released from prison after an attempted murder. She goes to a party where the host mysteriously disappears and people start encountering doubles of themselves. The party-turned-mystery becomes the center of two different realities which begin to overlap. In one, we have the fallen America and in the other-an America that survives but becomes authoritarian.

Emily St. John Mandel continues to use the Swan Dive phenomena that connects this novel to The Glass Hotel




Another one of my most anticipated book of 2026 & I'm jumping in.

[Ceecee]

It’s 2031 and the USA is at war with itself, fracturing into separate entities. Ari, newly released from prison, is in the Republic of California and here, there is some hope with things becoming safer and thus, the LA curfew is lifted. She attends a party with her flatmate Gloria but it’s a very strange, unsettling affair and it’s obvious that something is very wrong. As California becomes increasingly expensive, she moves to Ohio and eventually to Paris, but she remains haunted by that night. As time goes on, more and more strange things occur and it becomes harder to answer the question of what is reality? The novel is divided into two parts, Side A is a divided USA and a B side, a different world, perhaps more advanced but it comes with a big BUT.

Wow, just wow, what have I just read? This is an amazing novel I find utterly gripping as it pushes boundaries, making me think yet it also has a memorable haunting quality to it. I have no difficulty in buying into the concept as there are things in the universe that can’t be explained by logic. There’s a constant sense of unease, of danger breaking out wherever and whenever and there is a very claustrophobic sensation, especially in the B side. There are some vivid images that will stick in my mind especially via the art that plays an important role in the storytelling.

The worlds presented are clearly dystopian but via various characters who have a genuine connection, it presents a more “human” face. It’s complex, multifaceted, incorporating several themes including political instability and divisions, the necessity to survive, there’s friendship, loss and parallel lives and realities. Myself and quantum physics will never be happy bedfellows but the author explains the events so clearly, it presents no difficulty. It’s deeply thought-provoking and should serve as a warning to us all, as nothing here is unrealistic and so, let’s avoid stepping blindly in. Forewarned/forearmed and so on.

The characterisation is excellent, especially that of Ari/Ibari and Nico and like the worlds they live in, they’re complicated.

Overall, this is a fantastic novel which is written with clarity and creativity, it’s dark and it needs focus as sands keep shifting but the payoff is so worth it.

Great cover art, which sums the book up to perfection.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Pan Macmillan/Picador for very much appreciated early copy in return for an honest review.

[Bruce Katz]

“In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace. The trees bloomed in the same week that international peacekeeping troops withdrew from Los Angeles.”

Spring 2031. Ari Waker has been in prison for almost two decades. Finally released, she walks the streets of LA like some latter day Rip van Winkle (her last name winks at the connection). Things changed dramatically while she was away. There was a coup, after which several states seceded almost immediately, and then several wars began. There is no longer a “United States.” Some parts of the country have formed their own new republics, others are more chaotic and unruled. There are border wars, internal wars between rival militias. Traveling from one region to another is very dangerous.

Ari’s LA is now part of the new Republic of California. Life is getting… closer to normal, but normal is a relative term. Soldiers with bomb sniffer dogs still patrol the street because of the threat of terrorist attacks. Shanty towns have sprung up everywhere. A Walgreens has been repurposed by the Red Cross to house people displaced by fighting elsewhere in what used to be the United States.

On the very night the the Los Angeles curfew is lifted, Ari and her roommate Gloria go to a party to celebrate. Ali won’t know anyone where they’re going — they’re Gloria’s friends — but she had a premonition that she has to be there. She’s had them before (and will again) and has learned to listen to them.

Her world begins to change yet again at this party. People will come and go — people who look exactly like one another but have different names, wear different clothes, appear at different times. And disappear, like the painting that is suddenly there and just as suddenly gone. Something inexplicable is going on.

What’s going on, we will discover, is that Los Angeles exists in two separate universes. Somehow there a breach has appeared in the barrier between the two universes. Some people have passed from one to the other and can’t get back. And doppelgängers now exist in the same plane.

In her new novel, Emily St. John Mandel takes us into the multiverse. There are no Marvel superheroes or villains, of course, no spandex costumes. “Just” two parallel universes with the same geography (if not the same maps) and many of the “same” people. But the universes are very different. Ari’s LA is a remnant of a country that has broken apart, descended into violence. The other Los Angeles is in a country that is no longer the United States but the United State. It's an authoritarian country with universal surveillance and secret police who make sure people don’t engage in “pro-democracy activities or other subversion.”

The two universes are presented one after the other in the book, with a few short transitional interludes between them. The author refers to the first, Ari’s, universe as “Homeland.” The second is “Side B.” Somehow, they are bleeding into one another, and in time a handful of people become aware of the breech.

”Homeland” shows Ari leaving LA and making her way across the continent: getting involved in gunrunning, narrowly escaping ambushes, hiding from assassins, and ultimately fleeing the country for Italy, then France. In “Side B” Ibari (which happens to be Ari’s legal name) is a detective in the Internal Security Service. A secret detective because Service wants it that way: if people can’t be confident that the individual they’re talking to — stranger, friend, family member — isn’t an agent who can send them to prison or disappear them, they’re going to behave. As the State succinctly puts it, “the difference between mayhem and order is control. The State was a fortress and Service was the wall.”

In Exit Party,” St. John Mandel uses the science fiction trope of parallel universes to explore very serious problems in the here and now. “Homeland” is a broken and dysfunctional world. It's not Mad Max territory. Not yet, at least. It’s recognizably our world but it's been altered in ways large and small. Sometimes the author captures this with more a hint of humor. “New York was the capital of the Atlantic Republic now, and the Atlantic Republic wasn’t affordable either, because it was the most stable part of the entire former nation and people will pay anything for the feeling of not living in a war.”

In addition to violence and dissolution, climate change has transformed the world. Wildfires break out around the world. Phoenix is so hot in summer that people sleep all day and move about at night. A child doing a cartwheel in daylight in August would, we read, “have third-degree burns on both hands.” Paris is under a dome with controlled, artificial weather. And of course, (once again reflecting our world) there's class-related civil unrest: “the city would be protected against extremes of weather, and could be sealed off in the event of a pandemic or a dirty bomb. There were protests both for and against: the cost of the dome would be borne by the taxpayers of all of France, but only the elite center of Paris would be protected, and construction would require the demolition of nearly a thousand buildings.”

“Side B” has experienced climate change as well. Massive “solar fans” cool cities during daylight hours, for example. But the main differences between “Side B” and “Homeland” are cultural and technological. “Side B” has “Holospace” rooms. Immunizations against cancer. A colony on the moon. Autocracy: desert prisons, “black sites,” work camps. State orphanages for children whose parents have been taken. Surveillance drones that look like fireflies in the night sky. “The state had taken control of every university, thus saving countless lives and helping to ensure a harmonious society.”

There is, unsurprisingly, an underground Resistance that plays a part in the narrative. The "exit" in "Exit Party" works on several levels.

There’s more than enough action and suspense in “Exit Party” to keep readers eagerly turning pages. Plenty of twists to engage the intellect. Wry humor. And a painting that mysteriously appears throughout. The book will no doubt engage readers on many levels, particularly among those who will try to puzzle out the many links between this and other books by the same author.

To me, though, “Exit Party” functions most powerfully as a the author's premonition of our future. In her two dystopian visions, set ominously only five years from now, we are presented with two dire possibilities facing our world, our country, if current trends continue. Everything the describes is with already with us today, albeit at lesser magnitude: The violence that pops up with increasing frequency, climate change causing catastrophic fires and deadly heat, surveillance, expanding authoritarianism. Reading the book, I found myself thinking more than once of Ben Franklin’s famous remark, “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” (I confess, I was also reminded of Yogi Berra’s equally — more? — famous direction, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” But that’s just how my mind works.) All of which leads one to wonder whether we’ll have the wisdom and will to take a third path that is neither Homeland or Side B.

My thanks to Picador and Edelweis+ for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest review.

[ana (ananascanread)]

you know a book is good when you reach the halfway point and realise you have absolutely no f*cking idea where it could possibly go.

i genuinely cannot explain what happens in this book without ruining it, so just know that at some point i was reading this like i had been personally betrayed by reality.

i'm obsessed.

thank you to the publisher for the free copy

[Gregg Rosenthal]

If you love St. John Mandel like I do, this is very much in her wheelhouse. I'm going to go read the Singer's Gun soon. Wish I did before, but the novel works either way.

[suspenseisthrillingme]

A hauntingly beautiful and nuanced story of alternate realities, societal collapse, and “what if?” scenarios, Exit Party was an utterly transcendent read of identity, resilience, and family. Taking a deep dive into a handful of deeply relevant themes such as surveillance, freedom, and the price of safety, it was quite a timely tale considering our current world. You see, Mandel took a speculative-slash-sci-fi narrative, mixed it up with a heavy pinch of literary fiction, and held up a warped mirror of what our future could look like if we’re not careful. Mixed into this profound, razor-sharp message, however, was a complex, well-constructed plot that was as poignant as it was mind-bending. I mean, not only did it require me to stretch my mind into the world of metaphysics, but in true Mandel style, some of the questions were left unresolved, forcing me instead to think about the questions posed instead of being handed all of the answers.

As much as I loved the dystopian vibes in this immensely thought-provoking read, I do have to say that the found-family feel, surreal yet evocative atmosphere, and deeply human characters were what made this book hit me so hard. Dreamlike yet also more than just a little bit nightmarish at the same time, the emotionally complex personas at the center of the mystery were easily the stars of the show. Bringing to life the stark beauty of everyday moments while also showing the world on the brink of collapse, Mandel delivered a strong juxtaposition that left both the people and the situations lingering in my head long after I finished the last ambiguous page. So whether you’re already a fan of the great Emily St. John Mandel or a newbie to her immersive works of fiction, I definitely recommend getting your hands on this one now. Lyrical, insightful, and beyond clever, it was a truly awe-inspiring and unforgettable read. Rating of 4.75 stars (upgraded).

Read if you’re a fan of:
- Genre-twisting novels
- Complex storylines
- Immersive storytelling
- A dystopian setting
- Deeply human characters
- Timely topics
- Thought-provoking themes
- Mind-bending plots
- Lyrical prose
- Morally ambiguity
- A near-future setting
- Found-family vibes
- Multiple timelines and POVs

SYNOPSIS:

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.

Thank you Emily St. John Mandel and Alfred A. Knopf Books for my complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.

PUB DATE: September 15, 2026

Content warning: gun violence, war, murder, domestic abuse, emotional abuse, gaslighting, terminal cancer, death of a parent, child abuse, mention of: trafficking, addiction

[Melanie (meltotheany)]

♡ signed b&n copies (available as of may 21st)

♡ Station Eleven ★★★★★
♡ The Glass Hotel ★★
♡ Sea of Tranquility ★★★★

[Ian Payton]

A story of love, loss, and surveillance. In a near future post-collapse USA, Ari goes to a party being held to celebrate the end of the LA curfew. But something is very wrong. There are people there who shouldn’t be there - who shouldn’t exist.

This is a story told in two halves. Ari has recently been released from prison when she goes to the party, and the first half is largely her story - the story of how she navigates a half-life on the periphery of crime in the context of a broken USA consisting of city-states and militia groups. She is haunted by what happened at the party, and by the people who shouldn’t have been there. The second half is the story of those other people. To say much more would be giving away too much, as the mystery of what has happened is maintained for much of the first half.

There are consistent themes of loss, regret, and what might have been, which run through the story and most of the major characters. This is set alongside a country and government that is chaotic, unpredictable, and overbearing - where challenging those in charge can have consequences where a transparent system of justice cannot be depended upon.

The characters are complex and flawed. There is nobody whose story arc isn’t compromised by the events and consequences of the party - with impacts across family, friendship and parenthood.

The story is told across various times and places, often in flashback, spanning decades beyond the time of the party. As the consequences of decisions are played out, those themes of loss and regret become poignant and powerful - and the ambiguous morality of aligning with the state, or attempting to subvert it, has lifelong impact.

I don’t want to say more about the plot, as this is a book that is best experienced without any prior knowledge or expectation - but it is richly imaginative and superbly told.

Thank you #NetGalley and Pan Macmillan / Picador for the free review copy of #ExitParty without obligation. All opinions are my own.

[Lisa of Troy]

Emily St. John Mandel? Must Read!

[Ruxandra Grrr]

I don't know what the world will be like in September, but my schedule is cancelled for this book.

[Caitlin Fisher]

🚨🚨controversial take incoming 🚨🚨 this is my least favorite em St. John mandel I’ve read, and I REALLY hate to say that.
If you’ve talked to me at all in the last like ~4 years or so you’d probs know that “Sea of Tranquility” is, to me, a perfect book, and I also adore “the glass hotel” and “station eleven,” the other two books of hers I read. I was totally expecting this one to also be an easy homerun for me, but I am forced to turn Judas. 💔
I think what I love so much about the three Mandel novels I’ve read is how effortlessly she weaves together far-flung characters, plots, timelines, and realities into something profoundly human and beautiful and transient and moving. But all these elements really don’t come together in the same way in “exit party,” and I’m not really sure why.
I think potentially what it could be is a general lack of feeling and care between characters, and internally in the heads of the narrators. The first half of the book was a slog for me (relatively—even if I didn’t like this, I still couldn’t put it down for very long without wanting to pick it back up again), mostly because I didn’t care about Ari at all, or what happened to her. I think the entire Paris section doesn’t really do enough to justify it.
Another problem I had was a lot of this book, instead of making us wonder how these distant characters are connected as Mandel usually does, spends the entire time going over how characters we’ve already known are connected, connect. There was no tension, really, as a result, and things felt repetitive.
The second half of the book really picks up, and I wish it had been the whole of the novel. It’s where the usual Mandel-things occur: found family, an uncaring person making a selfless act to save another. But because it was only half the book, the emotional impact doesn’t hit as hard.
Anyways long review to say what I expected to be a 5 star is tragically a 3!

[Colin Jack]

The world is ending, and Emily St. John Mandel is inviting us to the party!!!

No one captures the beauty of ordinary moments on the brink of catastrophe like Mandel. The hush before the collapse, the shimmer of illusions breaking, the slow realization that history has already shifted under your feet.

I have a feeling Exit Party is going to be haunting, dazzling, and impossible to put down. Who else is ready for Mandel’s next masterpiece?

[Sara]

Jump clif of time
dive away from sea of gun
drunk art of love
be moon
search truth ston
away from the war aton
be brave
be loved even if changed mode
or name
or city
or war man
be loved

[Rachel]

I have never felt as lucky as I did the day this book arrived in the mail. That may be a a slight exaggeration, but getting to read this ARC of Emily St. John Mandel's newest novel will probably be a highlight of all of 2026 for me!
This is a hard book to talk about without spoiling anything. Just know that ESJM has you in good hands here. One of the main reasons I love her books is because it's obvious that she deeply trusts her readers. Starting on page 1, she isn't gonna spoon-feed you a bit of information or connect any dots for your. She trusts that you, the reader, can do it if you give her time, and my fellow readers, I beg you to trust her back because the pay off is worthwhile.
Exit Party is smart, rich in nuanced characters, and a beautiful look at what it means to live despite the horrors around us. This book releases on September 15, 2026. If you've loved her other works, you will no doubt enjoy this one too!

[Bill Muganda]

WE HAVE A COVER!!!!!! Wake me up in September!

Update: September is here!!!!

[The Bookish Elf]

Somewhere in the second hour of a house party in Los Angeles in the spring of 2031, the host looks across his own living room at a friend in a silver pleated dress, then turns and finds the same woman standing against the wall behind him in shorts and a T-shirt, frightened, asking what city this is. Nobody screams. He decides to be a good host to both of them. The flowers are everywhere, the rain is coming in through the cracked windows, and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel spends the next three hundred pages working out what that evening cost and who ended up paying for it.

The Rules Emily St. John Mandel Sets

The rules are laid out quickly and never over-explained.

Ari Waker is forty-eight, two months out of an eighteen-year federal sentence, and living in Echo Park with a roommate she knows through a woman she met inside. The United States has come apart after a coup, California is its own republic, and the jacarandas are in bloom. At the party, two guests briefly exist twice and the host disappears between one room and the next. Years later and several collapsing territories away, working surveillance for an Ohio militia, Ari photographs a stranger who has her old roommate's face and voice, no scar, and a different name.

That is the whole mechanism, and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel is disciplined about it. There is no chase to reopen the door, no plucky team assembling equipment. There is a physicist who spends decades visiting defrocked academics with theories about objects that exist in two places at once, and a small oil painting called Swan Dive that hangs on a wall in both versions of the world.

The A-Side and the B-Side

The novel is built like a record, and Mandel labels the halves as such.

The A-side belongs to Ari: a dishwashing job, a motel room in Ohio where she sells rifles with a former ballet dancer, a run south through checkpoints, a one-word note delivered by a child outside a Denny's, and then Paris, where she marries into money and grows old under a glass dome modelled on the weather of the 1990s. The B-side crosses to the other timeline, a United State that never fractured because it closed like a fist instead: exit visas, facial recognition on every doorway, and a detective called Ibari Waker who has Ari's name, Ari's childhood and none of her convictions.

The argument running underneath is which catastrophe a person would choose, and the novel refuses to make that easy. Readers who like their quantum mechanics load-bearing will notice that the physics stays deliberately thin. This is a book about the many-worlds interpretation the way The Glass Hotel was a book about finance, which is to say it is interested in the people standing next to the machinery.

The Things Emily St. John Mandel Nails
The surveillance chapters. Ibari breaks her glasses, repairs them with a strip of silver tape, and discovers that her face no longer resolves for the scanners. What follows is the best sustained writing in Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel: a lifelong rule-follower discovering, in her forties, a small private appetite for crime.
The economy of the collapse. Six eggs bought at ruinous cost from a family guarding a coop with a rifle. Tents pitched on the roofs of strip malls. A school running in a former TGI Fridays. Mandel never lectures; she prices things.
Ari as company. She is funny, unsentimental and entirely unrepentant about most of her life, and her premonitions are treated as an irritating utility rather than a gift.
The backlist rhymes. Anton Waker, Olivia Collins and the Alkaitis name return from The Singer's Gun and The Glass Hotel. Nothing here requires them, but readers who know those books get an extra floor underneath this one.
Where Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel Gives Ground

Four things keep it from the top shelf of her work.

The Paris middle drifts. A long section hands the book to a young art thief researching a wealthy collector, and his stakeout is the least urgent hundred pages in the novel.
Two of the best characters leave early. A gunrunner with a dancer's discipline and a retired mercenary with a taste for armoured trains both exit just as they become interesting.
The transcript chapter is a stunt. One section prints only one speaker's side of three hospital conversations. It is clever, it is borrowed, and it keeps the reader at arm's length in the exact stretch where warmth was available.
The A-side knows it is the support act. Once the surveillance state arrives, the picaresque drift of the first half looks thin by comparison, and the book never quite rebalances.

None of that is fatal. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel remains the most interesting thing she has done since Station Eleven, and the last twenty pages are close to perfect.

Read it if / Skip it if

Read it if you loved the structural braiding of Sea of Tranquility; if you want dystopia written at ground level, in eggs and bus timetables; if you like a protagonist who has done something unforgivable and declines to grovel.

Skip it if you need your speculative premises explained; if a novel that changes protagonist twice sounds exhausting; if you want the door reopened and the ending sealed.

The Last Word

The novel ends in a New York studio in 1960, at twenty to four in the morning, where a painter who will be dead within the year is deciding how to break up an expanse of ocean. Not a whole figure. Just a pair of feet going under in the top corner. His rival sleeps on the couch behind him. He is annoyed by her, he needs her opinion, and he knows the way he works will not last.

That small scene is the key to the whole book. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel is about objects that outlive the people who made them and the countries they were made in, and about how little warning anyone gets before their world is replaced by another one. It drifts in the middle and it declines to explain itself at the end. It is still the novel I have thought about most this year.

[Nikki Lee (Nikkileethrillseeker)]

This was pretty slow. About 30-40% in, I still hadn’t a clue to what was going on. I felt it moved at a snails pace and the characters showed zero emotion. Everything felt surface level.

Many are loving this book, so what do I know, right?

[CJ Alberts]

Found this to be totally serviceable and well constructed and readable but for a book set in a dystopian future where America has collapsed and everyone is living under mass surveillance it weirdly doesn’t say anything about that or engage with it in any meaningful way????????

[Katie B]

Thank you Knopf for sending me a free copy!

You have no idea how happy I was to receive an early copy of Emily St. John Mandel’s new book, EXIT PARTY. My husband and I are both big fans of this author. Our reading preferences tend to differ so it’s nice to be able to eagerly discuss her novels. With such a beautiful and purposeful writing style she has created this interesting world in which there’s a connection to her books but yet they each fully stand on their own feet. Keep in mind though if THE SINGER’S GUN is on your tbr list, you’ll want to read it first as there are some spoilers for it in EXIT PARTY.

Her books are best read not knowing too much ahead of time and just seeing everything naturally unfold. In this one it’s 2031 and America has been in a total upheaval, at war with itself. California is now the Republic of California and with the curfew lifted there’s reason to throw a party. But there’s something off about this particular get together.

Such a neat concept for a story and fits in nicely among her previous works. While it didn’t hit me on the same level as STATION ELEVEN or SEA OF TRANQUILITY, I still enjoyed it quite a bit. It truly is a pleasure to read anything she puts out as there’s so much thought behind the words.