Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel is the October read for the New Scientist Book Club

In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace. The trees bloomed in the same week that international peacekeeping troops withdrew from Los Angeles, and the convergence of flowers with the absence of foreign soldiers brought a delirious kind of hope. Everyone in the spring of 2031 knew the city was one terrorist attack away from disaster, but that peril made the season more vivid, not less.

It was Ari’s first spring outside of prison in nearly two decades, and she spent hours at a time walking the streets. Prison is a wasteland of sensory deprivation, and now the city was overwhelming. She kept expecting that the details of the world would cease to be extraordinary, but that kept not happening. No one around her seemed to notice the jacarandas, because in Los Angeles there are flowers every month of the year, but she walked streets where the trees were lit up by purple blue blossoms and thought, My god. This place. She was forty-eight years old but felt younger, because so much of the world was new.

The United States had come undone following a coup d’état. Several states had seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbours, and war had broken out within the month. Now the fighting had subsided, for the most part, and Ari had been released into an uneasy aftermath.

“When I think of what the city was a year ago,” Gloria said. Gloria was Ari’s roommate in a very small apartment in Echo Park. She was about a decade younger than Ari, a refugee who’d fled fighting between rival militias in Tennessee. Gloria slept in the bedroom. Ari slept in the living room, with an old sheet stapled to the door frame as a makeshift door, and they met one another in the tiny kitchen. Gloria seemed to spend most of her time reading the news online, her eyes wide and blank in the blue light of her laptop. What the city had been like a year ago was Gloria’s favourite topic of conversation.

“I know,” Ari said gently, although she didn’t. Their experiences were not the same. A year ago, Ari had been imprisoned in what was now a different country and Gloria had been holed up in this apartment with a different roommate.

But tonight the curfew had lifted, and when Ari had gone for a walk earlier, her impression from passing conversations was that everyone in Los Angeles was going out tonight. Gloria was going to her friend Kareem’s party, one neighbourhood over, and had invited Ari to come. But now, with dusk approaching, she’d settled into her familiar position with her laptop at the kitchen table, and showed no signs of getting ready.

“What time shall we leave for that party?” Ari asked.

© Emily St. John Mandel

This is an extract from Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador), the October read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord here.

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