Readers Dessert

Today I’m continuing our “completist” author series, in which my team and I share our experience with authors we love so much we’ve read every book they’ve published, six book minimum. 

I began the series by writing about my love for Maggie O’Farrell, who is perhaps my favorite living author. When it came to who I might feature next, I had options! And I landed on Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel because I greatly admire her work, of course, and also because of the timing: I’ve only recently completed all her published works. 

Like so many readers, Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven was my introduction to her work. That novel captivated me: I love stories that bring together seemingly unrelated plot lines in interesting ways; Mandel’s breakout weaves together a global pandemic, a traveling Shakespeare troupe, and a graphic novel. I feared it would be depressing, but instead found it striking, sympathetic, and hopeful, and re-read it numerous times in the years just after its publication in my quest to identify just exactly what it was about this book that spoke to me. 

rereading Station Eleven at the beach

After revisiting Station Eleven numerous times, I finally picked up her 2012 crime novel The Lola Quartet in the summer of 2018. I wish I could remember why I decided to read it then: context clues point to a likely vacation impulse buy at our favorite beachside bookstore. What I know for sure is that I read it at the beach, and that experience directly led to a new project. On that trip, I shared an Instagram Story featuring what I was reading that day: my paperback copy of The Lola Quartet, water-spotted from poolside reading. 

I was stunned by reader responses to that story, which by and large said, “I loved Station Eleven; I’m so glad she has a new book coming out.” Stunned, because it wasn’t new; at this point, it was six years old. Those responses and some subsequent soul-searching and readerly questioning planted the seed of the idea for our podcast One Great Book.  

snapped on June 3, 2018

I gobbled up The Lola Quartet, and then intended to become a Mandel completist. That intention that didn’t stick: I remember checking the Last Night in Montreal ebook out from the library after our trip, but didn’t get very far. I don’t know why my attention wandered. But I continued reading Mandel’s books in order, as they were released. That means The Glass Hotel was next, then Sea of Tranquility … until this summer—but we’ll get to that when we look at individual titles. 

Back in 2018, The Lola Quartet surprised me in a different way, not just via your Instagram replies. In reading it, I learned that so many of the characteristics I found captivating in Station Eleven were in fact not unique to that novel, as I had assumed, but instead were characteristic of Mandel’s more general style. 

reading Sea of Tranquility in 2021

As I continued reading her work, I grew familiar with the hallmarks of her writing: a distinctive voice, rotating points of view, catalogs and lists, nonlinear narratives, intricate plotting. Her prose is easy to read (I find) yet intellectually demanding. She seems consistent in her interests: characters running from the past, characters forced to remake themselves or wholly become someone else, characters who contemplate (or actually live out) alternate versions of their realities. Over and over, we see themes of criminality, art and survival, parallel lives, identities shed and reconstructed. 

Mandel plays with place and with travel (between cities, between worlds), resetting timelines, and building out something like a cinematic universe through her body of work. (She loves an Easter egg!)

When I wrote of Maggie O’Farrell, I spoke of the emotional resonance that drew me to her work. Not so with the work of Emily St. John Mandel: there’s an elegance and restraint to her prose that makes her invented worlds feel hazy, almost dream-like, to me. I’ve found this at-a-distance feeling frustrating in other authors’ novels, but I find the central questions that anchor Mandel’s novels to be interesting enough to overlook it. Or perhaps that’s not quite right: perhaps Mandel’s emotional restraint leaves room for the reader to have her own emotional experience.  

snapped in October 2019

As you can see, I’ve meandered my way through her works, and that approach has been lovely. I don’t think there’s a bad order for her novels. But, in the spirit of a Mandel novel, let’s consider an alternate reality, where the Anne who is now an Emily St. John Mandel completist could advise a different Anne, living in August 2026, who hasn’t yet read a single Mandel novel. Past Anne would tell present Anne to read The Singer’s Gun now, read The Glass Hotel for kicks if there’s time, pounce on Exit Party when it comes out in September 2026, and from there to wherever the spirit leads her. 

I hope you enjoy this look into the works of Emily St. John Mandel. Here’s a bit more about my experience with her novels. I’d love to hear about your own in comments. 

Publication order:

• Last Night in Montreal (2009)
• The Singer’s Gun (2010)
• The Lola Quartet (2012)
• Station Eleven (2014)
• The Glass Hotel (2020)
• Sea of Tranquility (2022)
• Exit Party (2026)

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In her haunting, wistful 2014 dystopian novel, Mandel imagines the end of the world as we know it, and it’s nothing like you’re expecting. Hours after a famous actor suddenly dies onstage during a performance of King Lear, a global pandemic known as the Georgian Flu sweeps the world. In her signature style, Mandel weaves together the stories of five characters, featuring a traveling Shakespeare troupe whose members earnestly endeavor to maintain art and hope. (“Because survival is insufficient.”) Readers’ appetites for pandemic-related stories may vary, but rest assured this book is anything but depressing; I found it striking, sympathetic, and hopeful. More info →

This 2012 release is the kind of page-turner I love: a compulsively readable literary mystery, featuring stylish prose plus a plot that keeps you turning the page to find out what happens next. I was so impressed by the way Mandel unfolded the story piece by piece, introducing us to a seventeen-year-old girl in hiding (with piles of cash duct-taped to the underside of her baby’s stroller), and slowly revealing how she ended up there—and how the members of the old high school musical group the Lola Quartet are connected to her disappearance. Set in muggy South Florida, the story is dripping with atmosphere and has a noir feel. More info →

“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, and never coming back. He is stunned, though perhaps he shouldn’t be, as he’s known she has never stayed in one place for very long. She has her reasons, which we will soon learn about through a multitude of voices: as Eli tries to track her down, as we meet the private investigator who’s been tracking Lilia for decades, as the PI’s daughter shares her own perspective, as 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. Unlike 2018 Anne, 2026 Anne inhaled this and named it a Best Book of Summer. More info →

It wasn’t until I got to Mandel’s author’s note at the end of her forthcoming book Exit Party that I learned of the connection between the two books, and decided to go back and read this, her second novel. When shortly thereafter I learned a community read of The Singer’s Gun was starting in MMD Book Club, I jumped on it. This book is about a family whose business is crime, primarily stolen goods and forged documents. Anton is now in his twenties and desperately wants to go straight, but when his cousin (incidentally, the protagonist of Exit Party) begs for his help to complete one last job (for him) and enter into a new and promising industry (for her), his family strong-arms him into obliging her request. I tore through this, then went on to her debut Last Night in Montreal to solidify my completist status. More info →

Emily St. John Mandel’s signature storytelling style connects characters across seemingly unrelated events in this 2020 release. The story follows bartender Vincent on the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, who is running a Ponzi scheme, and agrees to pose as his wife until the financial empire collapses. Years later, an investigation begins after a woman disappears from the deck of a container ship. Part classic noir, part financial thriller, part ghost story. This is the first book in which I noticed Mandel was up to something with her multiverse: close readers will note overlap with events and characters from Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility, and Exit Party. More info →

In her 2022 time travel novel, Mandel weaves together three main threads: an exiled eighteen-year-old who hears an unusual sound while trekking through the Canadian forest, an author whose book tour takes her to the moon, and a detective whose investigation ties these tales together. We follow them from 1912 to 2401 in a unique story of space, time, art, and a pandemic. I was just as struck by the structure of Mandel’s work as I was by the character development. I enjoyed this mind-bending and utterly unique novel on the page, but if you enjoy audiobooks featuring multiple narrators, try that format for a fully immersive experience. More info →

Mandel’s seventh novel publishes on September 15, 2026. This was one of my most anticipated reads for Fall 2026, and I’ll be talking about it more at our upcoming Fall Book Preview. Exit Party 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 end of the curfew and withdrawal of soldiers from the Republic of California. 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. More info →

Do you have a favorite Emily St John Mandel novel? Please share in the comments.

P.S. Where to start with Maggie O’Farrell and more of our team’s Completist Author series.