The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Emily St. John Mandel has been consistently one of my favorite writers over the past number of years. The Glass Hotel and especially Sea of Tranquility have been some of my favorite books in the years they were released, so I have been looking forward to her newest book Exit Party since I heard it had a release date, and to cut to the chase, I was not disappointed.

The story, as is often the case with Mandel’s works, involves a number of timelines and in this case even multiple worlds. As we begin, we follow Ari Waker, a recently released ex-con who is going to a house party in Los Angeles in the year 2031. It’s the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the curfew in the city has finally been lifted, and people are in a celebratory mood. Ari is joined at the party by her roommate Gloria, whose friend Kareem is the host. During the party Ari notices a person who looks just like Gloria but is wearing completely different clothes and calls her by a legal name that she never uses. Later, Ari sees Kareem coming back to the apartment, where he insists to her that something is “wrong” with the party. He had also seen duplicate people there, which unnerved him and made him leave for a bit. They both go back into the apartment, and before Ari and Gloria leave for the night they try to say goodbye to Kareem, but he’s nowhere to be found, despite having last entered a kitchen with no other apparent exit. The only thing left behind is a painting on the floor named “Swan Dive.” As we later learn, Kareem is never seen ever again.

From this simple setup the book then unfolds over the course of an additional 40 or so years into the future, as well as across a dimensional barrier into an alternate Earth. Mandel’s books often have big, mind-bending ideas in them, and Exit Party is certainly no exception. Where she really excels, though, is with her characters, and in this book she even gets to give us two versions of some of them. On ostensibly our Earth, Ari is an ex-con who later in life becomes a Parisian philanthropist. In the alternate Earth she’s an operative for the State’s surveillance apparatus who eventually has to investigate the disappearance of her friend Nico (Gloria) during the teleportation experiment. Being able to compare and contrast the characters’ personalities between the two realities was a fascinating exercise.

Mandel also continues a recent thread of the importance of water and water themes in her books. In The Glass Hotel the book opens and closes with a character who is swept into the ocean off a container ship. In her follow-up, Sea of Tranquility, water is implied in the title even though parts of the book take place on that named part of the moon, which is devoid of actual water. In this book one of the central items is a painting named “Swan Dive,” a painting from the 1960s that was a connection point between the two realities, which some of the characters believed might somehow allow passage back and forth. It depicts a pair of feet disappearing into a blue ocean. The painting was also seen in the hotel lobby of The Glass Hotel, further connecting her recent works. The book ultimately ends with a short chapter about the original artist deciding to paint the piece in the first place.

As I led with, I really loved this book. Between the world building and the jumps in the timeline and perspectives, I didn’t know what to expect next from it. If you’ve enjoyed any of her recent books, or are looking for a book that has big ideas and keeps you hooked until the end, I highly recommend it.

As I write this, we are now only hours away from the release of the Booker Prize shortlist for 2026. I gave it my best shot to read all thirteen of the longlist entries before the reveal and I feel like I've done all I can at this point. I have at least started twelve out of the thirteen, which is the maximum number currently available for sale in the US right now — The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis doesn't come out until sometime in October. I am only a few pages into Switzy by Emma Cline, but I don't expect I'll finish it by the Tuesday deadline.

Let's do a quick whirlwind tour of the remaining books that I did complete in time.

The Renovation

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan is the first one up. We follow a Turkish émigré named Dilara, her husband, and her aging, Alzheimer's-suffering father, who are now all living in Italy. Dilara has hired contractors to renovate her home's second bathroom to help it be more suitable for her father, only to find that instead of a bathroom, they have connected her home to a prison cell back in her native Turkey. The story alternates between her acceptance of this strange fact and flashbacks to the family's time in Turkey as her father came under harsher and harsher scrutiny by the regime.

I totally get the concept of magical realism and I've enjoyed some books featuring it as their central premise, but I just didn't love that part of this book. The fact that it was a literal portal between Italy and Turkey and that she eventually started even interacting with the other prisoners there just didn't work for me. The other parts of the book, though — related to the feelings of abandonment on having to leave the country of one's birth, combined with losing her most direct link to her past with her continually declining father — were very affecting and definitely the high parts of the book. Given the fact this has made it on the National Book Award fiction longlist, I have a sneaking suspicion it will move on to the Booker Prize shortlist as well.

All Them Dogs

The next entry that I finished was All Them Dogs by Djamel White. This tells the story of a young Irish gangster named Tony Ward, who has returned home some five years after murdering a rival gang member and having to flee to London. Tony's first order of business after returning home is to reestablish himself in the local gang structure by proving his worth to a crime boss named Flute. What follows could have been a minor story arc on a season of the Sopranos, though swapping Italian accents for Irish ones and a significantly higher dose of homoeroticism. As is often the case with mob/gangster stories, I didn't find Tony or really any of the main characters to be sympathetic and I certainly wasn't rooting for him in any way. I was decidedly neutral about the book until the last few pages, which did tip me slightly over into the "like" camp. If you are looking for an Irish-themed gangster book, it's probably not a bad shout. I'd be very surprised if this one made it onto the shortlist, though.

The End of Everything

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison is meant to be the genre pick of the list, which I’m all in favor of sci-fi being recognized, but I found nothing to take away after reading this. It’s stated premise, is that in the near future a kind of alien invasion has taken place, but its scope and outcome is very undefined with the exception of weird things coming out of the sea. I simply couldn’t follow what plot there was to speak of in this book, and what I did understand had some especially brutal acts of causal violence. This is one I don't have a good sense of for the shortlist, but I don’t think it makes it.

John of John

The final completion on my list is John of John by Douglas Stuart. This book follows John-Calum Macleod, a young man who, after completing art school but with no prospects after graduation, returns home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, where he lives with his father, the devout Presbyterian lay preacher John, and his maternal grandmother Ella. John and Cal have a strained relationship, with John often verbally and even physically attacking Cal out of anger over how Cal has long hair and doesn't dress respectfully enough for the preacher. John is a particularly unlikable character. It's revealed early on that despite being so outwardly pious and "Christian," John has had a near-lifelong same-sex relationship with a nearby neighbor named Innes. This eventually led to the dissolution of his marriage when she found out, leaving Cal to live with John and Ella growing up. Cal himself is gay, but due to his fears of what his father would say or do to him, he of course can't ever tell John that. I rather enjoyed this novel — unlike a lot of other prestige literary fiction, there was a through line of a plot — and I thought the ending was also properly well earned. I think, based on a lot of the criticism and reviews I've read, that this one will definitely be on the shortlist, and until recently might have been the odds-on favorite to win the actual prize this year.

Now on to my DNFs.

The Vivisectors

The first of which was The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams. This was billed as an odd romance story set in a university town, which has an unusual arrangement where a group of specialized gardeners help control the natural world from overrunning the city. I made it about 30% of the way through this book, but I just wasn't connecting with it. From some of the blurbs and reviews I had skimmed, I thought maybe there would be a more spooky or supernatural angle to the overgrowth and ruin taking over the city, but at least to the point where I stopped reading, none of that was apparent to me. What I actually got was long discussions of a particularly politically active student who had recently been involved with some incidents at the university. Maybe one day, if I am really looking for something to read, I'll come back and try and finish this, but only time will tell. Despite my feelings on it, I think there is a lot of consensus that this book will make it on the shortlist.

The Disappearers

The final DNF was my most disappointing, The Disappearers by Marlon James. The buzz around this book is undeniable, with the NYTimes review even going so far as saying it's possible that it's the book of the century, which seems like insane hyperbole, and yet basically every other TikTok, BookTok, or YouTube video will say something very similar. So I am very sad that I wasn't compelled to finish it. James is well known as an incredible writer, but I found it very difficult to get through the Jamaican patois dialog and the visceral and extensive depictions of violence. I know that this component is one of the main factors in everyone saying this book is a classic and has such resonance, but it was all too much for me to continue on through the nearly 600 pages of total length. This book is the biggest lock for the shortlist I can think of, and I would also be gobsmacked if it doesn't win the actual prize as well.

And so the Booker Prize longlist roundup comes to an end. I will endeavor to finish the last two at some point in the future, and if there are any out-of-left-field omissions or selections for the shortlist, I'll be sure to comment on that in a future post. Has anyone else been reading along with the list? Does anyone have a favorite that isn't The Disappearers? (If it were up to me, my pick would be May We Feed the King.) But let me know who you think will take the grand prize.

I was recently going through the list of Booker Prize nominated works from recent years past and I noticed one book that I had seen come up on lists before but never really looked into what it was about. That book was Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and after taking a look at the synopsis I realized that not only did it sound interesting, but it was more topical than ever.

In this book we follow the story of Klara, who is an AF, or Artificial Friend, a solar-powered robot whose main goal is to provide friendship and companionship to children. Through bits and pieces in the book we can infer that the story is taking place in a near-future dystopia where children are especially isolated and in general do all their learning remotely, only occasionally getting together in essentially play groups.

When we first meet Klara, she is learning about the world by watching the cityscape outside the large window of the AF storefront. From there she sees a number of things that her robotic brain interprets in ways that are interesting, and later important to the story, including a piece of construction equipment called a Cootings Machine and Beggar Man and his dog, who she believes are resurrected by the power of the Sun. It's also where she comes into contact with Josie, the 14-year-old main human protagonist. They have an interaction through the window one day, and eventually a few weeks later, Josie does make her promised return to the store, and after some convincing of Mother, they purchase Klara and bring her home.

Once home, we learn a little more background about the world we're in. There is some sort of elective procedure, genetic editing it sounds like, that parents can have done on their kids, which ultimately makes them much smarter and more capable than normal kids, leading them to be called "lifted". It does seem like it's not without its risks, though: Josie's sister Sal didn't survive the procedure, and Josie herself is often very weak and ill.

The rest of the story is Klara navigating her new life as Josie's AF and the family dynamic of Mother and Josie's neighbor Rick, who is "unlifted," which will leave him at a huge disadvantage in life despite his obvious aptitude at making and flying drones. As they try and navigate Josie's continual health issues, Klara puts her faith in the Sun to come up with a solution to the family's issues.

I really enjoyed this novel and it's fascinating to read a story of what we'd now call AI, but written in a time before LLMs were introduced to the world. Klara is portrayed as caring and compassionate, but often her understanding of the world about simple factual things like the Cootings construction machine is completely of her own design. It is, though, a little ironic that devotion to the Sun and her pact-making with it could actually be interpreted a little like how modern LLMs have their hallucinations. She saw the Beggar Man brought back to life in her way of understanding, and combining that with the fact her body is solar-powered, she confidently created a mechanism that she believed was real. And given the fact she never fully explained what she thought was happening to any human, she was never gently redirected to update her worldview. Which to be fair can be said of many humans these days as well.

Klara and the Sun didn't even make the shortlist of the Booker Prize the year it was nominated, but Ishiguro himself is a Nobel laureate in Literature, so I suppose there is no accounting for taste. I think it would have been a well-deserved winner though, and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a more compassionate version of AI in their life.