Independent booksellers across the country have chosen Emily St. John Mandel's Exit Party (Knopf) as their top pick for the September 2026 Indie Next List.
“A world descending into chaos. Another strangled by repression and surveillance. Imperfect choices…which do you fear more?" said Anmiryam Budner of Main Point Books in Wayne, Pennsylvania. "More importantly, Emily St. John Mandel asks: which world will be ours?”
Here, St. John Mandel discusses her work with Bookselling This Week.
Bookselling This Week: I was reading this as we passed the date mentioned in Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Coupled with the fact that you used the phrase “soft rain” very early on, I couldn’t help reading Exit Party with an eye towards how much things stay the same even as they change. Would you tell us more about how you approached and built the world(s) of Exit Party?
Emily St. John Mandel: Exit Party started with a character. My second novel was called The Singer’s Gun, published by a small press way back in 2010. Exit Party is in no way a sequel to that novel, but the villain in The Singer’s Gun is Ari, who’s the major protagonist in Exit Party. She was interesting to me as a character, and I never stopped thinking of her even after all these years. I found myself thinking, what would that character be like at a completely different point in her life, after a very long prison sentence? An idea that interests me is that at a certain point in your life, you look back at your life and you’re not looking back at a life, singular. You’re looking back at one life after another. I wanted to see her next life.
The rest of the worldbuilding just comes from reading the news and absorbing the political climate in the United States.
BTW: I’d love to hear more about the decision to switch the point of view and narrating character from section to section as we sort of follow a thread across both worlds. (One short section is even formatted as a transcript!)
ESJM: I’ve always done that in my novels, because I think getting multiple points of view is an interesting way to tell a story. The transcript is there because I find that form works really well for exposition.
BTW: There’s a line that both versions of Ari deliver, which hits incredibly hard these days: “societal breakdown is exhausting”/“living in a surveillance state is exhausting.” But I also find it weirdly hopeful, in the refusal to give up. What do you hope readers take away from this book?
ESJM: Hope. No country lasts forever, but also no version of a country lasts forever, and that means that even the worst iterations of any given nation have an expiration date. The thing is, living in a surveillance state is only exhausting if, on some level, you’re fighting the surveillance state. It isn’t exhausting to surrender. It’s exhausting to resist.
BTW: Can we talk a little about Swan Dive, and the decision to make it so pivotal here?
ESJM: While the painting doesn’t appear in my other works, the artist does. The painting is there for a couple of reasons. I’m interested in the way art moves through time, the way different people can have their own relationships with a work of art over decades or even centuries. It’s an interesting kind of immortality.
So I wanted to include that idea in the book, but also there’s a purely technical narrative reason: when you’re grappling with a very complex book, with multiple timelines, POVs, etc, I find it’s useful to have an object or two move between characters and timelines as a kind of throughline. That was the Dr. Eleven comic book in Station Eleven, and it’s the painting in Exit Party.
BTW: For our final question, we like to bring it back to Indies. Would you tell us about the role of books and indie bookstores in your life?
ESJM: Independent bookstores have been very important to my career, and they’ve also always been magical spaces to me. When my wife and I were looking for our wedding venue last year, we spent some time casting about in the usual places — private rooms in restaurants, etc. — and then decided to take a different approach. We thought: what spaces make us happy? With that new framework, the choice was obvious, and we were delighted when Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn agreed to host our wedding. There were twelve or so guests, one bouquet of flowers, coffee, and croissants. We hosted an open book bar. It was perfect.