Completist Author: Emily St John Mandel

Mandel's seventh novel publishes on September 15, 2026. It begins in the spring of 2031, the first spring after the collapse of the United States, at a party in Los Angeles held to celebrate the withdrawal of soldiers from the Republic of California—that is, the beginning, it is hoped, of peace. But something strange happens at this party: a kitchen door becomes a portal to an an alternate authoritarian reality. I found this to be thrilling on a plot level and also deeply intellectual; it will hold up to repeated rereadings. Mandel is clearly having fun with her Mandel multiverse here, bringing in characters and referencing plot points from The Singer's Gun, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility, and musing about the possibilities of a duoverse, inside a novel that is itself a duoverse, with an "A Side" and "B side." This broke my brain in the best way; I can't wait to read it again.

"No one stays forever." So begins Mandel's debut, and, as it happens, the last book of her body of work that I've completed. The story begins with Lilia walking out of the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her boyfriend Eli to get a paper (she says), but she never comes back. He is stunned by her disappearance, though perhaps he shouldn't be, as he's known she's never stayed in one place for very long. She has her reasons, which we will soon learn through a multitude of voices: Eli as he tries to track her down, the private investigator who's been tracking her for decades, the PI's daughter as she shares her own perspective, Lilia herself reflects on the lure of staying put vs the unavoidable urge to move on. It was remarkable to me to see the many similarities this crime debut had to Mandel's later and decidedly more speculative works.