Emily St John Mandel knows “it sounds deranged”, especially given everything she has just been saying about the political devastation of the United States, but Exit Party, her new novel, is “a hopeful book”, she feels. “Who will you be at the end of the world? I think of that as the book’s central question. It does imply that you’re going to be something and that things will go on. There is hope and art.”
The Canadian author, best known for literary phenomenon Station Eleven, is at her standing desk in Queens, New York – “That’s the East River out the sliver of window” – and explaining the genesis of Exit Party, in which she explores two distinct visions of the near future, both of them nightmarish, yet ameliorated to some degree by human resilience, connection and a Mandelesque belief in the beauty of the world.
“An idea that I’ve been fascinated with for a long time is this notion of the counterlife, the life you didn’t live,” she says. “I think about the way I would be a somewhat different person if I’d remained in western Canada, say, instead of coming to New York City when I was 22.”
She started writing her seventh novel in the spring of 2022, well before the reelection of Donald Trump, but even then there was a sense of brokenness in the country in which she has lived most of her adult life. “I cannot overstate how fractured and stressful this country is at the moment.”
She cites The City and the City, China Miéville’s speculative fiction novel, in which the citizens of two cities occupying the same geographical space are trained not to see the other city. They have two completely different understandings of reality. “That notion has seemed less and less fantastical to me with the passage of time,” she says.
Mandel does not write to a plot outline, preferring not to know exactly where she’s going to allow for “the possibility of weirdness”. But as she started to write the “A-side” of Exit Party, which opens in an unstable, violent and militia-ridden version of 2031 not long after a second American civil war and the collapse of the United States, she began to think about the flipside, or the “B-side” as it is demarcated in the book.
Mild spoiler ahead. In this counterlife, there is no Republic of California, no Republic of Ohio, but a singular, authoritarian United State, in which total compliance is secured by surveillance technology and the enforcement powers of a Stasi-like “Service”. Events such as “the last of the pro-democracy demonstrations” are recalled as distant history.
“I had this fairly chilling experience of struggling to stay ahead of the news cycle on the B-side. All of a sudden, with the Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids in American cities, the idea of masked secret police sweeping up civilians and disappearing them into unmarked cars was suddenly not at all fictional.”
‘I feel much more in common with people in, say, London or Paris than I do with people in upstate New York’
Emily St John Mandel
Enter Ari Waker. It is not necessary to have read Mandel’s second novel, The Singer’s Gun, to read Exit Party, but a villain from that earlier novel returns as the central protagonist this time. Newly released from prison, Ari goes to a party in a chaotic, tent-filled Los Angeles, where a stranger – who seems to have a twin – mysteriously calls her by her unused legal name, Ibari. The host, Kareem, goes missing. Later, Ari encounters a woman who looks exactly like her old flatmate Gloria, only this version has no scar.
The idea of doppelgängers as “the physical embodiment of the counterlife” has been on her mind since she was a kid. “I had a nightmare about doppelgängers when I was quite young that kind of stayed with me. It’s just such an unsettling idea.”
What’s more unsettling, the idea that there’s a worse version of you out there somewhere, or a better one? “Neither is great, honestly.”
With Ari, who thinks of herself as a reformed character but still retains her ruthless edge, Mandel wanted to examine “the essential components” of a person’s soul and how this might be shaped by their world. “I love the idea that the thing you don’t like about yourself might be one of the things that keeps you alive.”
The act of parenting is also key to the novel in a way it didn’t tend to be in Mandel’s writing before she had her daughter – with former husband, Kevin Mandel – in 2015. “I didn’t know enough about parenting to put it into my work before I was a parent, which is not to imply in any way that an author who isn’t a parent couldn’t write about those themes. For me, personally, it took being a parent to understand some of those nuances.”
She has always liked writing books that span genres. “I think of [Exit Party] as literary fiction, but then it does absolutely have that speculative element to it, and I think what that can give to us is a way of thinking about the present moment that’s bearable. A realist novel about the rise of nationalism and the fracturing of countries might feel quite unbearable.”
There are Mandel touches aplenty in Exit Party. Guilt manifests in the form of a ghost. A capacity for premonitions isn’t as useful as it might seem. Just as a graphic novel passes down the generations in Station Eleven, art is a recurring focal point in the form of Swan Dive, a painting by Lucas Alkaitis, an artist character from her novel The Glass Hotel.
“I’m interested in the way a work of art moves through time, and the way multiple people across decades, even centuries, can have quite intense relationships with it that truly mean something to them. I love that idea,” she says. The more practical benefit is that an object like this can be “helpful for cohesion” when writing a multi-stranded novel.
Although Mandel’s books are all stand-alone, the links between them have prompted fans to muse about the Mandelverse. “I love that term,” she says. It’s less of a mouthful than the Emily St John Mandel Cinematic Universe, another one she’s heard. And she’s always had a penchant for dropping in these callbacks to earlier books. “There’s some pleasure for me in trying to create these connections and some semblance of order in a chaotic universe. I love the idea that every story can kind of glance off of another story, and there’s a whole other drama unfolding just out of sight.”
Exit Party sees the return of the climate-controlled domes that featured in her last book, Sea of Tranquility. One over Paris, to which the action shifts, looks like “a series of giant soap bubbles”, with the buildings on the other side of its semi-transparent wall “faded out like ghosts”. The domes are “a terrible solution”, she says. “I don’t even know that they’re feasible from an engineering standpoint. But, you know, it’s a science fictional trope for a reason.”
Starting with her first novel, 2009’s Last Night in Montreal, Mandel’s cities – and not only her futuristic ones – have been skilfully rendered. She feels “very at home in large cities”, she says. “It feels to me like there’s a greater cultural connection sometimes between cities than there is between, say, the city and the countryside in a given country. I feel much more in common with people in, say, London or Paris than I do with people in upstate New York.”
Born Emily St John Fairbanks – St John, her middle name, was her grandmother’s maiden name – in 1979, Mandel grew up in the “absolute opposite” of a city in British Columbia, first on Vancouver Island, then on Denman Island. “It’s the same size and shape as Manhattan, but with a thousand people. It’s just trees. It’s a lot of trees.”
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She found this beautiful, but “a bit claustrophobic in that very small town way”. A trained ballet dancer, she moved to Toronto at the age of 18 for a conservatory programme in contemporary dance. From about eight or nine years old, she had written short stories or “fragments of short stories”, thinking of it as “just this odd little hobby” she enjoyed.
“Then, when I was about 22, I realised I didn’t want to be a dancer any more, and I thought, well, I could take this more seriously and try writing a novel.”
Last Night in Montreal was published when she was 30, then came The Singer’s Gun and The Lola Quartet, before a big step forward in her career in 2014. Station Eleven, her story of how civilisation slowly rebuilds itself after a deadly flu has killed most of the population, was an immediate hit, with Mandel winning both the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science fiction novel and legions of new fans. It has now sold more than 1.5 million copies, boosted by the second wind of Covid and a 10-part HBO Max adaptation – commissioned in 2019 – that presented her ultimately comforting, even uplifting, take on a post-apocalyptic society right at the time when people needed one.
While promoting The Glass Hotel in 2020, Mandel found she kept being asked about Station Eleven, and she put this experience into 2022’s Sea of Tranquility in autofictional form through the character of Olive Llewellyn, a 23rd-century author of a bestselling pandemic novel.
The pandemic also wound up being a catalyst for change in Mandel’s working life. Although she wasn’t involved in the Station Eleven series, she started working on television scripts during this time, including a planned adaptation of Exit Party, and she now divides her time between New York and Los Angeles.
“The pandemic was so solitary and I had this feeling afterwards that I don’t think I want to just work by myself alone in a room any more. To be clear, I do love that, just not all the time,” she says. “[TV writing] is such a collaborative experience, and it’s also health insurance.”
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She got divorced in 2022, which she bizarrely had to “prove” to Wikipedia editors by arranging a media interview to confirm it – the droll Slate.com headline was “Emily St John Mandel is divorced, Wikipedia” – and last year she married photographer and director Laura Barisonzi.
As we segue from talking about her childhood writing to recent alarm about declining literacy rates in the US, she once again offers an optimistic counterpoint.
“My impression of Gen Z is that they love books. It’s kind of extraordinary. My wife and I had this really lovely experience recently. We had some time to kill in midtown Manhattan, and we wandered into Bryant Park, which is a really lovely little park right next to the flagship location of the New York Public Library, and we stumbled upon this kind of strange scene where there was an outdoor stage, and a man was playing meandering, dreamlike piano music. The lawn was covered with people of I’d say a range of ages – but young people were very well represented – reading quietly on their picnic blankets.
“Then a man got up on stage and said, ‘Good evening, readers. You’ve reached the two-hour mark of our New York Public Library reading party. Please take a moment and go to the next blanket and discuss your books with each other.’ I thought, 0h my God, it’s a reading party.”
Part of the backlash against AI is “this longing for something real”, she says, and that includes the physical object of the book. It’s not something she would have predicted a decade ago but it seems to her that, for people in their 20s, books in the year 2026 are “kind of cool”.