Emily St John Mandel on her new novel, Exit Party, and the importance of holding on to art and humanity
Maia Snow is The Bookseller's news and website editor.
The Station Eleven author on her latest speculative literary novel, which opens with a party at the end of the world.
Maia Snow is The Bookseller's news and website editor.
‘Who do you want to be at the end of the world, and might you find some joy there?” On the surface, it’s a simple question, but when asked of characters thrown into extreme circumstances, becomes a deeply real one. It is a question author Emily St John Mandel first posed in her 2014 novel Station Eleven and is one that she asks again in her latest, Exit Party.
It is a powerful idea that extends to the title itself, capturing the essence of the novel in just two words. “Those two ideas were really important to me,” Mandel adds, speaking over videocall from New York. “I liked the idea of opening a book with a party at the end of the world. It is not the world’s literal end, but it’s the end of a country, and yet that implies the beginning of something new. There’s such hope at the beginning of the book at such a godawful time.”
Her new novel, set in 2031, opens with Ari (the same Ariana from her 2009 novel The Singer’s Gun but Exit Party works as a standalone) arriving at a party in Los Angeles after serving a 10-year prison sentence, on the day a city-wide curfew has been lifted. America is engulfed in a civil war, and the country has been divided into constantly shifting republics, with rebels engaged in fighting with splinter governments – and each other – for territory. But, before we learn that, there is a more pressing issue for Ari – it is not just the country that feels wrong; there is something off with the party too, and people there who should not be.
As with Station Eleven, Mandel encourages the reader and her characters to find art and humanity during seemingly hopeless times. In Exit Party, much of the novel revolves around a single painting, first seen at the party before weaving its own tale throughout the book. This painting appears at key moments in characters’ lives, acting as a near-future-dystopian Chekhov’s gun.
“[Finding art and humanity] is an important idea for me. I like seeing evidence of that in the world, you know, not just in fiction. As a species, we will do things like put on plays and concerts in refugee camps and war zones,” she adds.
“Those moments are ones which you might write off as frivolity: why would you spend the resources to perform Shakespeare in the post-apocalypse, or have a party at a moment when the country’s collapsed? I think that it touches upon something that’s actually vitally important around holding on to your humanity during very difficult times.”
This is going to sound deranged, but there’s no planning. I’m really just winging it.
Mandel’s novel is one of two halves. We spend the first half of the book in the US with Ari, as she unravels the mystery of the eponymous party and its mysterious attendees, all while battling her way across war-ravaged America. The second half of the book focuses on a different world, which imagines a different outcome for the US, following the same – or at least similar – characters living an alternate life, and explores how these two worlds are connected.
“I was thinking of the characters in this book in terms of the counter life, so the life you didn’t live. Where you married somebody different or didn’t [get a particular job] or whatever the inflection point was,” she explains. “Where that would have pushed your life in a different
direction and made you into a different person.” The parallels between the characters’ lives and the two versions of America stand out, as Mandel explains she is also “deeply interested in the counter life of the state”.
Mandel, who was born in Canada but now lives in the US and holds dual citizenship, explains the inspiration for Exit Party initially came during the pandemic as states fought to buy personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals while the virus spread across the US. “There was a moment I kept coming back to, at the beginning of the pandemic,” she says. “In the US there was a desperate shortage of PPE and there was such a vacuum of leadership at the top because that was during the first Trump administration. So, states were competing with each other to try to buy supplies to get us through. A consortium of states in the north-east of the country, where I live, came together to purchase equipment as a block.
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“I remember looking at this contiguous set of states on a map and thinking, ‘a group of states banding together out of a common aim, who are somewhat disenfranchised in the political system and culturally very different from states immediately to the south… This kind of looks like a country’. So that was when I started to imagine the Atlantic Republic in the book.”
This was an idea she expanded upon when imagining the 2031 civil war, adding that while she noticed this happening in 2020, since finishing the book – which took a total of three and a half years to write – she has noticed more real world splintering in recent months. States on the west coast are forming health coalitions in the face of conflicting and sometimes dangerous advice from the government. “Once again, I look at a map and think, ‘there’s the Republic of California’,” Mandel adds.
These mildly prophetic abilities are not new for Mandel, whose 2014 novel Station Eleven features an eerily familiar global flu pandemic. While some might feel the external pressure on their writing following an experience like that, Mandel insists she does not dwell on it. However, she is anticipating the inevitable questions when she embarks on her book tour in September, which she says will take her to 43 different cities in four countries.
Her latest novel continues her shift towards purer science fiction, something that began with Sea of Tranquility, a decision which Mandel says she made during the pandemic. Where previously she was worried about being taken seriously as a literary novelist, she instead thought: “You know what, everything’s awful, I’m going to write about a time-travelling detective.” One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is her ability to artfully weave characters’ stories together.
Mandel intricately plots each of her seemingly disconnected characters’ lives, carefully bridging the gaps between them, before revealing the long-awaited final connection. Despite the detailed and meticulous nature of their intertwined stories, Mandel admits, “This is going to sound deranged, but there’s no planning.
“I’m really just winging it,” she says. “When I set out into the first draft, I’ll have a scene – in this case the party – and then I don’t know what comes next until I’m writing that and figuring it out in the writing. The downside to that approach is that the first draft is pretty messy. I had to rewrite the second half of the book twice to make everything work. But for me, the novel comes together in the revision.
“The prose probably doesn’t change that much between the first draft and the published draft, but the characters are different. The structure is completely different and I’m moving parts around until the very end. It’s just round after round after round of revision, to turn a messy, unplanned, sort of mapless first draft into what you ultimately read. I think that what that gives me is a real possibility of surprise in that approach.”
Metadata
Imprint Picador
Publication 17th September 2026
Formats HB (9781035081288, £18.99); EB (9781035081318, £15.99)
Rights sold US (Knopf) plus 12 other territories sold to date
Editor Sophie Jonathan
Agent Anna Webber, AM Heath
