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About the book:
"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, Emily St. John 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 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"-- Provided by publisher.
" Exit Party feels like the culmination of Mandel's career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author's early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven. . . . Exit Party raises important questions about who people are when not just personal but societal circumstances change. As the narrator pointedly asks near the novel's close, 'Who will you be at the end of the world?'"
--The New York Times
"The only world-builder more efficient than Mandel may be God. . . . With the inventiveness of some crafty survivalist in our future, she welds together noir mysteries, classic sci-fi, spy thrillers, and poignant family dramas. . . . It's 1984 woven through a Möbius strip of her own boundless ingenuity. But for all those dimensional hijinks, what lingers is Mandel's poignant sympathy with these people lost in their world -- or another's. . . . Exit Party is the kind of novel you'll be desperate to talk about."
--Ron Charles
"Terrific. . . . A book that will move you. . . . The story deepens and expands in unexpected ways, across generations, into marriages, betrayals and rare acts of decency. . . . In the world of Exit Party, through all of its tragic turns, we find Mandel at her best."
--The Boston Globe
"Ingenious. . . . There's comfort in Mandel's arresting vision here of a universe in which time is porous and people are duplicated in somewhat altered form. In such a universe, maybe another America is waiting to be born, too."
--NPR
BYOB (there is a liquor store next door)
Event venue
Lilliput Books, 2150 North Halsted Street, Chicago, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.