Her hit novel Station Eleven seemed to predict the pandemic, now the novelist is tackling the future of the US. She talks about chance, world-building and experiencing a ‘tiny bit’ of clairvoyance
When Emily St John Mandel was a child she had a dream that would stay with her for decades. It was a nightmare in which “I was trying to find my dad in a crowd, and there were other people who looked like him but weren’t him”, she says. “It just kind of struck my imagination.”
Forty-ish years later, Mandel’s seventh novel, Exit Party, opens with a gathering in Los Angeles, 2031, where bizarre things happen. Doubles of some guests appear. Someone else disappears altogether. The novel then alternates between two potential future Americas, one riven by the chaos of civil war, the other a surveillance state.