Exit Party

Exit Party opens in Los Angeles in 2031, during the first spring after the collapse of the United States. Peacekeeping troops are leaving the city, the jacaranda trees are in bloom, and the curfew has finally been lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate make their way across Silverlake to a party, passing bomb-sniffing dogs, shanty towns and Red Cross tents on the way.

Inside the apartment the mood is ecstatic. People drink and dance, and one woman wears a silver dress pleated like tinfoil. Then something shifts. 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 tries to unravel what happened that night, the story, by Emily St. John Mandel, ranges widely. It moves from a future America split by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece, where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and on to the domed city of Paris and a colony on the moon. The novel deals with the price of safety and the dangers of the surveillance state, and it is both a requiem for a world much like our own and a story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.