Exit Party
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4.3 • 20 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of Station Eleven, Exit Party is Emily St. John Mandel's new mind-bending epic: a story of crimes committed and loves lost across space and time.
2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party.
Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn't be there. Something is very wrong . . .
Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality - and may hold the key to a very different world.
Exit Party is Emily St. John Mandel's electrifying new novel about freedom and surveillance, art and survival, love and loss in a broken world.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Emily St. John Mandel has a knack for taking big speculative ideas and making them feel strangely intimate, and Exit Party is another trip into her singular imagination. It’s 2031, America has fractured, the Republic of California has been declared and Los Angeles is celebrating the end of curfew with one hell of a party. Fresh out of prison, Ari arrives ready for a new beginning, only to find that something about the night is very wrong. From there, Mandel plays with fractured realities while exploring freedom, surveillance, art and survival in a world that has changed beyond recognition. Mind-bending without losing sight of the human beings at its centre, this is speculative fiction with plenty on its mind.
Customer Reviews
Too clever for me
The author is a Canadian writer best known for Station Eleven (2014), her fourth novel, set during and in the aftermath of a swine flu pandemic, and based around a travelling group of Shakespearean actors, one of whom dies on stage, literally rather than figuratively, early on. It won the Arthur C Clarke Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Women’s Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner, and was made into a TV series on HBO, before receiving a second lease of life (or death) on social media during the Covid pandemic. I’ve never been a big fan of sci-fi, but was impressed by the prose.
Barack Obama named her next offering, The Glass Hotel (2000)
as one of his favourite reads of the year, which I regard as a step up from Reese’s Book of the Month, although others may disagree.
All Ms M’s novels exist in a near-future altered reality her devotees call the “Mandelverse”, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your feelings about alternate universes, and possibly represents homage of sorts to the current grand dame of Canadian letters Margaret Atwood, who has churned out more than her fair share of dystopian fiction. (I prefer Atwood’s historical novels, but I’m just a grumpy old white guy. What would I know?)
Exit Party opens in LA in 2031. The USA has fallen apart after a civil war, the details of which are sketchy, but international peacekeepers have departed and the Republic of California has just been proclaimed. Protagonist Ari, a late forties woman recently released after 18 years in jail for a crime committed in Ms M’s second novel The Singer’s Gun (2010), goes to a party with her flatmate Gloria where weird stuff happens, although it takes our gal a while to work out what.
From there, she moves around the remnant areas of the US ruled by local militias, sustaining herself by selling guns and undertaking petty larceny, before ending up in Paris (France, not Texas) as you do. Fast forward 20 years and she’s a prominent art collector there, among other things, reflecting on how she got there with offspring of people she used to know, or alternate reality clones thereof. Or something like that. Other characters from Mandelverses past appear too, or are name-checked.
I didn’t understand it, but Ms M is a talented writer who creates her alternate universes elegantly with surprisingly few words.