Domed cities—those classic symbols of science (and climate) fiction—make an appearance in both of the novels we’re reading this month, which transport readers to the United States after a second civil war and an eerie utopian community on a Greek island.
Exit Party: A Novel
Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf, 320 pp., $32, September 2026)
The United States is known as a country of relentless—and sometimes naive—optimism. So it’s striking that, in recent years, serious thinkers from across the political spectrum have taken to warning of the possibility of a second civil war, or some other form of U.S. societal collapse.
In a stunning new novel, Emily St. John Mandel imagines what might come after that potential rupture. Unfortunately for human civilization, Mandel—a veteran of dystopian fiction—has previously proved herself an unwitting forecaster of very real geopolitical crises. Her 2014 novel Station Eleven was set in the wake of a global pandemic. Readers flocked to it six years later, and an HBO adaptation was quick to follow.
