LOS ANGELES, September 9, 2026 – Emily St. John Mandel checked the sketch. Then the eyes. Then the jaw. For years she’d pictured scenes “almost like a movie,” she’s said, but the faces stayed blank. Not this time. With a forensic artist’s help, she pinned down Ari Waker — small, amused eyes; high cheekbones; a strong, hard jaw; hair that’s a little rough because there’s no money for a nice cut. It matters because Ari lives two lives.
The fifth novel by Mandel, Exit Party, will be published this month by Knopf (320 pages, $32), and it is a definite departure from the Shakespearean acting company of Station Eleven. The novel begins in 2031, in an America fragmented into warring republics following a coup. Yet Ari, freshly out of an 18-year prison stint — “took out a contract on my cousin,” she says, calling it a mistake — is in high spirits. Spring in Los Angeles. Flowers. A party to celebrate a fleeting moment of stability in the new Republic of California.
Then things get weird. Two women who look eerily like Ari’s roommate and another guest materialize. The host vanishes. What follows is a quantum anomaly — a lab experiment gone wrong that punches a portal to an alternate reality featuring “different versions of ourselves,” as one character puts it.
The first part follows Ari through her travels around North America and ends in Paris; her background as a criminal is unexpectedly useful in a world plagued by political unrest and an underground economy. She constantly runs into individuals from that party. The second part turns the scene upside down: a world in which the United States is now called the United State, an oppressive state with total surveillance. In that world, Ibari Waker – Ari’s opposite number – is a spy who hunts down democracy activists.
And this is the catch: Mandel is not indulging in apocalypse porn. Like Kazuo Ishiguro, whose broken worlds read like serenades, Mandel discovers a silver lining within the destruction. She creates characters that struggle to find romance and art in a dying world. In Exit Party, the struggle manifests in the form of the party itself – a temporary respite from the imminent fall – and in the pairing of Ari/Ibari – two women with completely different life experiences but the same skeletal structure.
No one claims the construction is easy. Space-time portals that create two versions of the same character lead to inconsistencies big enough to be seen through a manhole. Mandel avoids the pitfall by making the sci-fi story about the characters. The criminal past of Ari helps her maneuver the world of conflicts and underground economy, while the job of Ibari reminds her about the price of stability. The novel is not about the wormhole but about the eyes – expressive and haunted, eyes that saw it all.
But why does this matter? Because Mandel’s audience expects a specific tone from her books: lyrical, mournful, subtly optimistic despite the grimness of the setting. “Exit Party” delivers on all fronts — and then adds a thriller’s rhythm. From the hedonistic party, in which Ari is overcome with the exhilaration of the newfound freedom and has an impromptu fling with another partygoer, to the hunt through different countries and different personas — it’s all a house of cards, but the player who put them together is a master of keeping it up.
What’s the lesson? Mandel demonstrates once again in her new novel that she’s adept at moving between tones without sacrificing her distinct authorial voice. And while the split reality idea was easily capable of becoming gimmicky, in “Exit Party” it serves well to highlight the key dilemma of the book: what are we when the world we live in isn’t the only one? Ari finds her answers in changing herself, moving around and surviving. Ibari’s answers are not as clear.
And yet the irony is that Mandel usually imagines her scenes as films but keeps the faces empty. However, for this particular story, she had to use the face, with its strong jawline, squishiness of cheeks and small eyes, which imply that a person finds it hard to stay serious, to tie up the two lives. “Exit Party” is not only a story about portals.
