It sometimes feels as though the United States has been at an inflection point for the last 10 years, with its tomorrows branching off ever further into unexpected directions. In Exit Party, acclaimed author Emily St. John Mandel explores two of those directions, each both alarming and intriguing.

Ari Waker lives in a world rent by revolution, in which America has devolved into a collection of disparate and ever-changing territories run by militias:

“Gun runners passed through the towns like smoke, shadows moving over the landscape. There was constant migration, cars laden with luggage and boxes traversing the expressways…Some people stayed where they were, because for them the idea of home was a physical place, but for others home meant something like memory or blood, so they moved closer to the people and the places they didn’t want to lose.”

Ari navigates this world with her wits — honed during her decades in prison — and an uncanny second sense that helps her intuit flashes of what is to come. When she attends a glitzy party in Los Angeles one evening, however, the world tilts sideways.

Two identical women (dressed differently) orbit each other throughout the night, neither appearing to see the other. One of them calls Ari by her full name, Ibari, which she has never used. A painting removed from a wall lies briefly on the floor before somehow winking out of existence. And a man named Kareem walks into a room with only one door but never walks out, having seemingly disappeared.

Decades later, Ari is living in a Paris over which a controversial artificial dome is being erected to keep out the extreme effects of climate change. (“The dome will protect us against the heat and the storms,” reflects her husband, “but what if something happens inside the dome?”) After reconnecting with a past acquaintance and being reminded of the strange events at the L.A. party, Ari is forced to accept that, canny as she is, there are some twists she can’t predict.

There is another version of the United States — or, in this case, the United State — lurking somewhere just beyond an invisible veil. In this surveillance state, another version of Ari, called Ibari, works for the state’s Internal Security Service. She’s been an apparatchik for so long that she no longer questions her role in the regime’s administration of law and order. “If you’re afraid of monsters,” she rationalizes, “becoming a monster yourself isn’t the worst play.”

After her position as a detective allows Ibari access to a mysterious refugee who seems to have materialized from another timeline, however, she senses an opportunity to right a wrong and fulfill a promise to an absent friend — a friend who, in fact, has crossed over to Ari’s timeline. Using her insider knowledge, Ibari dives deep into subversive activities on behalf of her friend’s family. Having learned about the other version of herself, Ibari reflects, “It was easy to imagine a scenario where I’d done something quite different, where I’d become a criminal instead of becoming the police. Two sides of the same coin, I thought.”

The risks she takes lead her deep into the state’s warren of punishment, to a prison without walls but also without hope:

“There were no fences of any kind. But to leave this place without completing one’s sentence was to become a ghost. The people here were in limbo…When parents were sent here, their children were sent to the orphanage, and the only possible way to see those children was to serve out one’s sentence in the camp.”

This painful description sounds eerily similar to the ICE detention facilities being run in the U.S. right now; perhaps we’re closer to this version of reality than we’d like to think.

Yet, amidst all the chaos and surveillance of Mandel’s novel, tendrils of hope emerge from the rubble. It is the author’s great gift to be able to blend the apocalyptic with the mundane, the terrible with the awe-inspiring. Exit Party delivers on both fronts.

Mariko Hewer is a freelance editor and writer as well as a nursery-school teacher. She is passionate about good books, good food, and good company.