Emily St John Mandel returns with a novel split between two future Americas
The author of Station Eleven has a new book, Exit Party, which imagines a country fractured between civil war and surveillance, opening with a strange gathering in Los Angeles in 2031.
Emily St John Mandel, whose 2014 novel Station Eleven became an unlikely touchstone during the Covid-19 pandemic, has published her seventh novel, Exit Party, according to the Guardian. The book opens with a gathering in Los Angeles in 2031 where uncanny things start to happen: doubles of some guests appear, while another person vanishes altogether.
From there the novel splits into two versions of a future United States, one consumed by civil war, the other governed as a surveillance state, the Guardian reports.
In the interview, Mandel traces the novel back to a recurring childhood nightmare in which she searched for her father in a crowd full of people who looked like him but weren't. She also discusses, per the Guardian, the sense of political fracture behind the book, asking how a country recovers "when half the electorate disagrees on basic reality."
No French edition or publication date has been announced in the material available.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
