Emily St. John Mandel’s seventh novel, Exit Party, opens in Los Angeles in 2031 with a mysterious gathering where strange events unfold, including the sudden appearance of doubles and the vanishing of one guest. The story shifts between two possible futures of America: one torn apart by civil war and the other governed by an authoritarian surveillance regime. Mandel, who was homeschooled on a small island in British Columbia before training as a dancer, has long been intrigued by the concept of the "counter-life"—the idea of living a different life by making different choices. She admits she wasn’t formally educated until she was about 15 and never completed high school. While working office jobs, she wrote fiction until her third novel, Station Eleven, became a massive success. Published in 2014, Station Eleven depicted a world after a global pandemic, a theme that gained new relevance during the real-world Covid-19 pandemic, earning Mandel a reputation for prescience. The novel has sold 1.5 million copies and been translated into 37 languages, with her subsequent works, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, also becoming global bestsellers. Exit Party features Ari, a character who first appeared as the antagonist in Mandel’s second novel, The Singer’s Gun (2010). The novel continues her exploration of interconnected stories, with characters reappearing across her works, suggesting a multiverse of narratives. Mandel says she has had a "touch of" clairvoyance, but insists she cannot predict major global events like pandemics. For instance, when the 2020 book tour for The Glass Hotel was announced, she felt an odd sense that it "didn’t feel real," a feeling that proved prescient when the tour was later canceled due to the pandemic. Mandel recently divorced her first husband, a fellow writer, in 2022 and married photographer Laura Barisonzi in 2025. Their wedding took place at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, a venue that has hosted many of Mandel’s book launches since the early days of Station Eleven. She has expressed concerns about the challenges facing Western democracies, particularly the "collapse of consensual reality"—a situation where significant portions of the population disagree on basic facts, such as the outcome of an election or the reality of a public health crisis like Covid-19. Mandel is drawn to speculative fiction because it allows her to explore contemporary issues through a lens of imaginative storytelling. Exit Party is her third speculative novel, and she is increasingly expanding her reach into television, working on adaptations of her own books and contributing to writers’ rooms. She divides her time between New York and Los Angeles, spending about one week in LA for every six in New York. She often starts her day writing fiction in the morning before joining a writers’ room Zoom call at 11 a.m.