After a deep dive into particle physics in September with cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s non-fiction title The Edge of Space-Time, in October the New Scientist Book Club stuck with physics but made it fictional, with Emily St. John Mandel’s new speculative fiction novel Exit Party.

Set in the near future, this is a tale involving quantum entanglement and parallel worlds, but Mandel being Mandel, it’s much more a tale of the people who live in those worlds than the physics that makes them possible. Our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson gave it a glowing review, saying Exit Party was “as elegant and brilliantly executed as [Mandel’s] fans will have grown to expect”.

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The book starts in Los Angeles in 2031 in the aftermath of civil war, as the curfew lifts and our protagonist Ari, recently released after years in prison, sets out for a party. She and her friends see some mysterious doppelgangers at the party, but the mystery isn’t really resolved until the second half of the book. By then, we’ve followed Ari through the anarchy and chaos of this lawless version of the US, and we discover that another version of the future is also unspooling.

I asked Emily (Mandel, that is) what it was like to write about her imagined near-future US when we chatted. “By the time I finished the book, I felt like I was struggling to stay ahead of the American news cycle,” she told me. “In 2022 [when she started writing], the notion of masked police seizing people off the streets or shooting civilians in broad daylight would have seemed quite fantastical, but those were literally the ICE raids in Minneapolis.”

I adored the novel Mandel is most famous for, Station Eleven, another imagined near-future but this time set in the aftermath of a flu pandemic. I agree with Emily (Wilson, that is) that this latest is just as beautifully and brilliantly written, but I wasn’t quite as compelled by it, at least for the first half of the novel. By the time we got to the second half, the drama and the science fictional elements ramped up and I ended up really enjoying it, but it’s never that great to press a book on a friend with the words “just give it 100 pages…”.

Book club members, chatting on as they read, were equally conflicted. “Just finished Exit Party. Not, IMO, Mandel’s best book,” wrote Tethysnz. “When I finished Sea of Tranquility, I went back and reread it right away to understand all the connections and undercurrents I’d missed. But with Exit Party connections are pretty clear and not all that interesting.”

Alan_P felt similarly to me about the first half – it’s “almost without incident except for the actual odd appearances and disappearances”, he wrote. “The pace does pick up a little in the final quarter of the book, but most of it is a beautifully described description of two very different societies,” he added. “It’s a good book – I don’t think it’s a great book but it is technically very good, and has an interesting ending. But it makes you work to get there and I don’t think that improves it.”

Matthew found Mandel’s writing style “overly careful, which gets in the way. Which isn’t to say she isn’t a very good writer, perhaps she just needs to let her hair down a bit”, while PiriShepherd, conversely, really enjoyed the novel’s opening. “I love the idea that a party is the place where the unintended bridge between universes opens up. A party is disorientating – somewhere you might be a bit drunk – where unexpected or inexplicable things happen – where people show up that you didn’t expect to see,” they wrote. “Where there might be consequences or disastrous events that extend beyond the next morning.”

“There’s such an intriguing start but then the mystery is largely left aside for a long time – possibly too long for the reader’s satisfaction?” said Dee55. “I found the book’s B part much more gripping – and disturbingly close to things that are already happening in some countries.”

Katita2026 found Mandel’s future visions very frightening. “She doesn’t give us a ‘bad world’ and a ‘good world.’ She gives us the two greatest political nightmares of the 21st century,” Katita   wrote, pondering if “the genius (and the terror) of this book lies precisely in this political pessimism”.

“By offering a world torn between absolute chaos and absolute tyranny, isn’t the author diagnosing that modern society has already lost the ability to imagine a future where democracy survives?” Katita asked.

As you can see, book club members really put this thoughtful, thought-provoking novel through the wringer!

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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, and the convergence of flowers with the absence of foreign soldiers brought a delirious kind of hope. Everyone in the spring of 2031 knew the city was one terrorist attack away from disaster, but that peril made the season more vivid, not less.

It was Ari’s first spring outside of prison in nearly two decades, and she spent hours at a time walking the streets. Prison is a wasteland of sensory deprivation, and now the city was overwhelming. She kept expecting that the details of the world would cease to be extraordinary, but that kept not happening. No one around her seemed to notice the jacarandas, because in Los Angeles there are flowers every month of the year, but she walked streets where the trees were lit up by purple blue blossoms and thought, My god. This place. She was forty-eight years old but felt younger, because so much of the world was new.

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The United States had come undone following a coup d’état. Several states had seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbours, and war had broken out within the month. Now the fighting had subsided, for the most part, and Ari had been released into an uneasy aftermath.

“When I think of what the city was a year ago,” Gloria said. Gloria was Ari’s roommate in a very small apartment in Echo Park. She was about a decade younger than Ari, a refugee who’d fled fighting between rival militias in Tennessee. Gloria slept in the bedroom. Ari slept in the living room, with an old sheet stapled to the door frame as a makeshift door, and they met one another in the tiny kitchen. Gloria seemed to spend most of her time reading the news online, her eyes wide and blank in the blue light of her laptop. What the city had been like a year ago was Gloria’s favourite topic of conversation.

“I know,” Ari said gently, although she didn’t. Their experiences were not the same. A year ago, Ari had been imprisoned in what was now a different country and Gloria had been holed up in this apartment with a different roommate.

But tonight the curfew had lifted, and when Ari had gone for a walk earlier, her impression from passing conversations was that everyone in Los Angeles was going out tonight. Gloria was going to her friend Kareem’s party, one neighbourhood over, and had invited Ari to come. But now, with dusk approaching, she’d settled into her familiar position with her laptop at the kitchen table, and showed no signs of getting ready.

“What time shall we leave for that party?” Ari asked.

© Emily St. John Mandel

This is an extract from by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador),��the October read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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