B.C.-raised Emily St. John Mandel returns with Exit Party as novel heads to television
B.C.-raised author Emily St. John Mandel has released her seventh novel, Exit Party, as the book is also being developed for television.
Photo: Laura Barisonzi
Emily St. John Mandel’s seventh novel will be published in Canada Tuesday, bringing the B.C.-raised author back to some of the ideas that have run through her work for years: fractured societies, alternate paths, surveillance and the uneasy relationship between safety and freedom.
Exit Party will be published Sept. 15 by HarperCollins Canada, just days before Mandel returns to British Columbia for a sold-out Vancouver Writers Fest appearance.
The release also comes as Mandel’s work continues to move between books and the screen. Exit Party is being developed as a live-action television series by LAIKA, with Mandel writing the adaptation and Emma Stone and Dave McCary’s Fruit Tree among the executive producers.
Mandel, best known internationally for Station Eleven, grew up for years on Denman Island, off Vancouver Island. In a new Associated Press interview published Monday, she reflected on how growing up in the small island community may have helped shape her longstanding fascination with parallel lives and the sense that another version of a person’s life might exist just beyond the one they chose.
Those ideas are central to Exit Party, which follows Ari Waker, a character Mandel first introduced in her 2010 novel The Singer’s Gun. Ari emerges from prison into a United States that has splintered after political collapse and civil conflict.
Set initially in 2031, the story moves through a world of curfews, surveillance and instability before expanding across decades. The novel’s official description moves from post-collapse Los Angeles to Greece, a domed Paris and a colony on the moon, while doppelgängers and alternate realities complicate what begins as a crime story.
The combination of literary fiction, crime and speculative elements is familiar ground for Mandel. Her 2014 novel Station Eleven, which follows a travelling group of performers after a devastating pandemic, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was later adapted into an HBO Max limited series created for television by Patrick Somerville.
Mandel followed it with The Glass Hotel in 2020 and Sea of Tranquility in 2022, part of a body of work in which characters and ideas increasingly cross between otherwise separate novels.
Screen adaptations have become another part of that interconnected body of work.
In a recent interview with Elle, Mandel said she is closely involved with several projects, including a feature-film adaptation of her debut novel Last Night in Montreal, a pilot based on The Lola Quartet, a Sea of Tranquility project connected to Sam Esmail’s company and the television adaptation of Exit Party.
The Vancouver Writers Fest is also promoting an anticipated television adaptation of The Glass Hotel, although that project has had a longer development history and its current studio or production status has not been newly detailed.
Mandel will return to B.C. shortly after Exit Party is released.
She is scheduled to appear at the Vancouver Playhouse on Sept. 21 for a Vancouver Writers Fest event covering Exit Party, her wider body of work and anticipated television adaptations.
Mandel will be in conversation with writer and journalist Michelle Cyca.
The event, presented in partnership with HarperCollins Canada, is already sold out, and the festival says there will be no waitlist.
Exit Party was published in Canada Sept. 15.
Emily St. John Mandel’s seventh novel will be published in Canada Tuesday, bringing the B.C.-raised author back to some of the ideas that have run through her work for years: fractured societies, alternate paths, surveillance and the uneasy relationship between safety and freedom.