Emily St. John Mandel in Conversation with Karen Thompson Walker

Emily St. John Mandel, the award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman — a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State — searches for answers. Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air. As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party (Knopf) is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change. Mandel will be joined in conversation by Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Strange Case of Jane O. Price includes a hardcover copy of Mandel’s Exit Party. Books distributed at event.