Emily St John Mandel's seventh novel, Exit Party, opens five years into our future, in 2031. Ari Waker has just left prison after serving an 18-year sentence for the attempted murder by contract killing of her cousin Anton. Much has changed while she was inside: a second civil war has devastated lives and blighted the economy, and the United States as such has ceased to exist.

The novel poses a central question: is the price of stability necessarily the loss of freedom? Two possible future worlds are linked in the new book from the author of Station Eleven.

Ari Waker is a familiar figure to Mandel's readers. In 2009's The Singer's Gun, the author's second novel, Ari appears as a cousin whose hard-nosed talent for operating outside the law has become a way of life — a foil to Anton Waker, the young protagonist desperate to break from his criminal family. A decade later, in The Glass Hotel, a painting called Swan Dive hanging in the lobby of the luxury retreat stood as a symbol of escape from a closing trap.

Readers will not need to have read either of these earlier novels to enjoy Exit Party, though their loose intertwining of narrative threads will provide extra pleasure and a sense of homecoming for those who have. It also lets observers trace 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 is the latest stop in a career that has built its following through exactly this kind of connected, speculative storytelling. Whether its post-crisis America — a country that no longer exists as the United States — deepens that following will be seen when the novel reaches readers.