Review: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
Toronto: HarperAvenue/HarperCollins Canada, 2026
I am a fan if Mandel's literary universe, and was thrilled to have the opportunity to review her latest release, Exit Party, for The British Columbia Review. This article was originally published at The BC Review on September 10, 2026.
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Exit Party’s opening chapter describes a party that has gone wrong.
In Vancouver-based Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, forty-eight-year-old Ari Waker has just been released from an eighteen-year prison sentence for taking out a contract hit on her cousin a lifetime ago. While she was incarcerated, America collapsed and devolved into numerous self-governing territories, and the California Republic has just lifted its curfew after longstanding turmoil. To celebrate, Ari and her roommate Gloria are going to a party, where their host Kareem has decorated his apartment with flowers on every table and filled his space with party-goers heady with the freedom from curfew.
This is the world of Side A in Mandel’s telling, a fractured America, militias ruling swaths of the country with violence, and climate change and political discord running amok throughout the world. At the party, strange happenings occur, and Ari runs into her distressed friend. “I can’t…There’s something really wrong with this party,” Kareem says. There are too many people, as doubles of some partygoers begin to appear. Then, Kareem disappears.
This hooking opening sets the stage for a novel that spans decades and continents, following Ari as she makes a life for herself, always seeking some form of safety, be it in a relationship, a business enterprise, or in the world of wealth. She is a satisfyingly complex character, a touch evasive on the page, a chameleon of sorts.
Mandel’s characters face upheaval constantly and are forced to reinvent themselves in order to survive. It’s an idea she plays with in her other books too, this notion of eras in a life. In one episode, Ari finds herself at one of many crossroads, another identity to shed, and a new one to assume: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: You get more than one life. The transition between lives is sudden or slow. Sometimes it’s a night flight to Paris, sometimes it’s waking to the news that your country is ending, sometimes it’s soldiers flooding the streets."
Characters face transport between universes, and through changes in life, suggesting the inevitably of impermanence. The timeline shifts, even in our own lives. One migrant from another place in the book, says it well:
“‘I think if you live long enough,’ Nico said, ‘you become a migrant from another timeline. There’s the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degree and after a while there’s nothing left of it, but you’re still here.”
Halfway through, the narrative switches to Side B. It is an abrupt transition, but an eerily familiar world. This, we realize, is a parallel universe. Here are the doppelgangers, living in a better timeline, one that is less calamitous, one where humanity is building colonies on the moon, and peace reigns. Peace, that is, under the auspices of the Service, a government police force that disappears any dissenters, and encourages family and friends to spy on each other. Here, main character Ibari Waker works for the Service and investigates an experiment gone wrong that resulted in people going missing.
Mandel is a master of language, a true wordsmith. There is a dream-like quality to her prose at times; she often uses phrase repetition to develop her themes, creating a quality of recurrence and familiarity, with a hint of the uncanny, something her characters often sense too, as they see ghosts, or experience premonitions.
A recurring idea in Exit Party relates to a 1960’s painting called “Swan Dive,” painted by Lucas Alkaitis, a character most seen in her 2020 novel The Glass Hotel. It’s a picture of the sea, with a diver’s feet seen in the corner of the painting as they plunge into the water. “Swan Dive” is a coveted artwork, at times acquired or stolen by different characters in different universes. Diving into water comes up again and again in the novel.
Midway through the book, for example, Mandel conjures magical prose, perhaps my favourite lines I’ve read this year. Ari Waker reflects, as she lay in an apartment’s back room gazing at “Swan Dive”:
I have reached a destination, and all I have is desire: I want to dive off a cliff into the sea in a warm country. No, the opposite. I want to dive off an iceberg into the Arctic Ocean. I want to plummet through clear air into shocking cold. I want to surface with the aurora borealis shifting overhead, green light rippling through the sky. I want to climb aboard a passing boat and set off for an unknown country. I want extremity. I want annihilation. I want to blow up my life and remake it, but how many times do you get to do that? I have spent my whole life pulling pins on grenades.
Later, Side B’s Ibari leads a double life as she labours for the Service, but begins having recurring images or urges that echo Ari’s longings: “I thought, I want to dive into freezing water. A strange idea that came out of nowhere….” Waking up, escape, a sudden shock to one’s consciousness: these are some of the ideas I contemplated as I read the novel. The book’s two Sides are also reminiscent of the longing for another life, a fantasy of being someone just slightly different than who you are.
I’m a fan of Mandel’s writing, and I’ve done a bit of a deep dive into the world building in her fiction. Her novels can absolutely be read as standalone books, but they are interconnected, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on which books of hers you’re reading. Exit Party, which takes place eighteen years after the close of her 2009 novel The Singer’s Gun, is actually a decent entry point into her literary world, and a fantastic novel on its own. I’d suggest that it’ll be a touch more magical if you’ve immersed yourself in her previous work, or plan to do so.
Mandel’s Exit Party is a worthy addition to her impressive oeuvre, combining a story that kept me turning the pages as it intrigued me with its core rooted in societies that are so reminiscent of our own, yet disconcertingly different. In telling stories of humanity in a universe that is slightly out of joint, the novel felt like an invitation to look up and around and take stock of one’s own sense of place and connection. It’s literary fiction married to science fiction that digs deep to uncover the roots of human motivation, and our joys and fears.
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