Exit Party
A Novel
-
-
4.2 • 78 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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.
“The only world-builder more efficient than Mandel may be God. . . . Exit Party is the kind of novel you’ll be desperate to talk about.”
—Ron Charles
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you’ve ever wondered, “Who am I, really? And how did I get here?” (and isn’t that everyone?), you’ll find yourself in this elegiac work of speculative fiction set across two parallel near futures. In one, the United States has fractured after civil war, and a party in Los Angeles takes an uncanny turn when doppelgängers begin appearing and the host suddenly vanishes. From there, Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel follows different versions of the same people through radically different lives, asking how much of who we become is circumstance, choice, or sheer chance. Connections to earlier Mandel novels like The Singer’s Gun and The Glass Hotel will reward longtime readers, but newcomers can enter this strange world without missing a beat. We loved the blend of sharp-edged sociopolitical science fiction and soft, mournful reflection on how much your past influences the kind of person you are—and the ways in which the past is truly another country.
Customer Reviews
Absolutely riveting
This is one of the craziest wildest dystopian books I’ve ever read and it’s absolutely brilliant. At every turn I was aghast at the the genuine terror these characters had in the surveillance state that both of the Kareem’s would end up and from where Nico and Saraya were also transported from. During an experiment to transport out of their authoritarian state that was highly surveilled and dangerous they made a mistake somewhere and 2 of the volunteers were transported to a parallel universe where the United States had fallen into a civil war and there was several city states and other states that where under militia control and it was chaos and the year of 2030. Nico leaves behind two small children her daughter who was 2 and her son who was 4. In the parallel world she ends up in Gloria is her double or doppelgänger and is a mother to her son Sebastian but the neglect she has allowed herself to put him through is horrible. It is Nico who will ultimately be the motherly figure that he needs his whole life and while Ari is in the broken states with Nico, Gloria and Sebastian her double is working to keep the promise she made to Nico to ensure her kids aren’t sent to the orphanage and because their original father Kareem is also subjecting them to horrific neglect she swaps the two Kareem’s and the one who has come come from the fractured United States and the republic of California will ultimately end up raising the two children that their first father couldn’t do and he goes into hiding into the shantytowns as a ghost to work with the resistance to take back their state from the surveillance state that is disappearing people who dare speak badly about it and those who commit worse crimes are never seen again. It’s hell on Earth in both parallel worlds yet in very different ways.
This author has the creative genius to write the absolutely best dystopian tropes there is. She’s so extraordinary and talented. She leaves me enthralled and in a state of awe every book she releases and they just get better and better.
Exit Party
I wish there was more to the story. There’s never really much closure in the author’s stories