Exit Party

Exit Party is Emily St. John Mandel's seventh novel, moving between a near-future Los Angeles fractured by the collapse of the United States and a scattering of far-flung settings shaped by the same unraveling world. In the first spring after the collapse, Ari Waker attends a party with her roommate where a disoriented double of one guest appears out of nowhere and their host disappears without a trace.

Trying to make sense of that single strange night pulls Ari across a landscape reshaped by crisis: a civil-war-splintered America, the seaside cliffs of Greece, a domed city in Paris, and a colony on the moon. As in Station Eleven, Mandel uses fractured, intersecting timelines and settings to build a story less about spectacle than about what people hold onto — and give up — when the systems around them stop working.

The novel continues Mandel's interest in surveillance, safety, and resilience amid catastrophic change, tracing a quiet thread of dark twinship between chaos and control across its parallel timelines.