In her second novel, 2009’s The Singer’s Gun, Emily St John Mandel tells the story of Anton Waker, a young man desperate to make a break from his criminal family. His plans are thwarted by his cousin Ari, whose hard-nosed talent for operating outside the law has become a way of life. A decade later in The Glass Hotel, a painting called Swan Dive that hangs in the lobby of the luxury retreat stands as a symbol of escape from a trap that is closing. You will not need to have read either of these earlier novels to enjoy Mandel’s seventh, Exit Party, though their loose intertwining of narrative threads will provide extra pleasure and a sense of homecoming for those who have. It is also interesting to observe Mandel’s evolution from a writer of quirky tales of offbeat protagonists to a novelist whose world-spanning, politically resonant narratives now attract a wide and devoted following.

Exit Party begins five years into our future, in 2031. Ari Waker has just come out of prison after serving an 18-year sentence for the attempted murder by contract killing of her cousin Anton. Much has changed while she has been inside: a second civil war has devastated lives and blighted the economy, and the United States as such has ceased to exist.

As the novel opens, the newly inaugurated independent State of California is celebrating the end of violence and the lifting of curfews. Ari and her flatmate Gloria have been invited to a party at the home of Gloria’s friend, Kareem. Ari has the feeling that she is meant to be there; she has experienced such premonitions before, and learned to trust them. Arriving at Kareem’s home, she has the sense that something strange is happening. A woman she’s never met before addresses her as Ibari – the name that is legally hers but never used. A painting disappears from the wall. Someone else talks of “extra people” and of the party being “a door that swings both ways”. “There’s something wrong with this party,” mumbles Kareem, before stepping out into the night and walking away.

Kareem never returns. But Ari does not have time to dwell on the incident. Forced back on her own resources, she spends the next few years working menial jobs, all the time with the underlying sense that there is a different future waiting for her, if she can only reach it: “It wasn’t that she thought she deserved more than what she had … it was just that she’d once had a considerable amount of money, her own business, and a beautiful apartment in a tower in New York City”. Old habits die hard, and it is not long before Ari falls back into criminal company. She is offered a surveillance job – she has always been attracted to detective work – but when the woman she is spying on turns out to be the doppelganger of Gloria, her former flatmate, Ari can no longer ignore the sense of deja vu that has begun to plague her life.

Ari’s world is fractious and chaotic, characterised by scarcity, systemic instability and the ravages of climate change. While her ability to adapt to every situation has enabled her to survive, it has also prevented her from making lasting attachments, a fact she recognises but cannot bring herself to regret. Gloria’s doppelganger Nico speaks of a different world, in which Ari’s own doppelganger Ibari is a high-ranking detective in a government secret police force known as Service.

In this other world, Nico was a physicist, part of a team conducting experiments into teleportation. She was also a dissident. In the novel’s second half, B-Side, we enter a United States where environmental catastrophe has been averted and resources are equitably distributed. It is also a society ruled by universal surveillance, in which the presidency is passed from father to son and where anyone veering from the established order is quietly disappeared.

This is a peaceful dystopia, its glittering streetscapes and self-styled progressivism more reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s concrete-and-jackboots Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is an eerie place, nonetheless. “I studied History before I came to Service,” Ibari says when asked why she decided to serve the lawmakers. “It made me terrified of discord.” While Ibari – reticent, calculating, a loyal arm of Service – might seem to be the polar opposite of the fiercely driven, anarchic Ari, the two women ultimately prove themselves capable of similar acts of recklessness and similar loyalty.

Is the price of stability necessarily the loss of freedom? The question plays out daily in our political reality, its fictional possibilities providing inspiration for writers from Plato’s time onwards. The “upbeat-downbeat” ending Mandel chooses for her novel is not new in science fiction; indeed, it bears comparison to her own earlier take on the post-catastrophe novel, the 2014 blockbuster Station Eleven. What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel’s imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights.

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What does the stolen painting Swan Dive represent? Freedom? Risk? A doomed plunge towards self-destruction? In one particular, irrecoverable moment, Mandel memorably demonstrates how by the end of this extraordinary novel it will have come to mean all three.