Emily St. John Mandel returns to dystopia with 'Exit Party" next up, an Emma Stone-attached TV adaptation

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Set us as preferred On the Shelf Exit Party By Emily St.John Mandel Knopf: 320 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Emily St.

John Mandel touched down in Los Angeles just hours before she arrived at Botanica in Silver Lake, shirt crisp, eyes bright, not a hint of jet lag in sight.The night before, she’d been in Brooklyn, celebrating the release of her highly-anticipated “Exit Party,” which is ricocheting up bestseller lists.

At Botanica, Mandel tells me it’s the best book she’s ever written, certainly the most complex and ambitious.The book kicks off in a tiny Echo Park apartment in the year 2031, just after the United States has collapsed following a coup d’état, a civil war has somewhat subsided and the curfew has finally lifted in L.A., which exists inside the fragile Republic of California.Ari Waker — whom Mandel completists may remember from her 2010 novel “The Singer’s Gun” — has just been released after serving nearly two decades in prison and is headed to a party in Silver Lake with her roommate Gloria.

The party is where things get weird.The author’s latest speculative dystopian fiction features parallel universes that explore alternate realities — and doppelgangers that stumble between the two.Mandel is batting a fly away near her iced coffee when I point out that she and I met at a party in Silver Lake, just a short jaunt from where we’re sitting.

At the time, I’d introduced myself by sharing that I’d received at least a dozen emails addressed to her, with the sender confused by another “Emily St.Something” and we share a laugh.

It was a few years before that Mandel had come to L.A.to bring “The Glass Hotel” from book to screen, a project that ultimately fell through.

She lives in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, but had just begun a love affair with Los ...