Novelist Emily St John Mandel, whose 2014 bestseller Station Eleven appeared to eerily foreshadow the Covid pandemic, has spoken about her new seventh novel, Exit Party, which explores alternative Americas and the "collapse of consensual reality" in modern politics. In an interview marking the book's release, she reflects on chance, identity and the unsettling cultural moment in which doppelgangers and deepfakes have made questions of truth and reality especially resonant.

Exit Party opens at a 2031 Los Angeles gathering where guests inexplicably double or vanish, before splitting into two divergent visions of America's future: one gripped by civil war, the other by mass surveillance. Mandel, who grew up home-schooled on a small island in British Columbia and had no formal education until 15, went on to sell 1.5 million copies of Station Eleven in 37 languages after it was rediscovered during the pandemic. She discusses building a loose "multiverse" of recurring characters across her novels, including Exit Party's protagonist Ari, a villain from her 2010 book The Singer's Gun, and describes experiencing mild, largely trivial premonitions throughout her life.