{"id":863815,"date":"2026-09-28T18:34:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T18:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863815\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T18:34:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T18:34:09","slug":"book-reviews-exit-party-and-redwood-the-untold-story-of-the-cold-wars-most-extraordinary-spy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863815\/","title":{"rendered":"Book reviews: \u2018Exit Party\u2019 and \u2018Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War\u2019s Most Extraordinary Spy\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Exit Party’ by Emily St. John Mandel <\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s hope that Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s gift for writing prophetic fiction is overrated,\u201d said Maureen Corrigan in NPR .org. Station Eleven, the Canadian<\/a> novelist\u2019s 2014 breakthrough, anticipated the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic. Unsettlingly, her \u201cingenious, eerie, and complex\u201d new work opens in 2031 in the immediate wake of the collapse of the United States. Fighting by then has subsided enough that Ari Waker, a woman in Los Angeles<\/a> who\u2019s recently completed a well-earned 18-year prison stint, feels safe enough to attend a party. There, by some strange accident, two guests from an alternative world materialize while the host vanishes into that same other dimension, where the U.S. isn\u2019t violently riven but is instead a placid authoritarian state with a citizenry under constant surveillance.<\/p>\n

Despite its science fiction framework, Exit Party, \u201clike all the best stories,\u201d is character driven, said Adam Begley in The Atlantic. In its first half, we follow Ari as she rapidly reinvents herself again and again, graduating from dishwasher to gunrunner, trophy wife, philanthropist, and Paris<\/a>-based art collector. The second half throws us into the other timeline, where Ari\u2019s doppelg\u00e4nger, known as Ibari, is a high-ranking undercover operative willing to disappear fellow citizens that pose challenges to the authoritarian government. Though these twinned protagonists act immorally, Mandel makes both Ari and Ibari compelling and sympathetic. And as in her previous novels, \u201cthe underlying theme is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life\u2014or end it.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

With its shifting time frames and stories nesting within stories, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter, \u201cExit Party sometimes feels dazzling and sometimes feels like it was composed by a squirrel with a Ph.D.\u201d Still \u201cit grows more satisfying with every page\u201d as we follow Ari and Ibari\u2019s misadventures. \u201cThe only worldbuilder more efficient than Mandel may be God,\u201d because she sketches each of her parallel dystopias in \u201ca few deft strokes,\u201d then immerses us in individual lives made complex by the particular circumstances in which those lives unfold. It\u2019s not always easy to understand exactly what\u2019s happening in Exit Plan, and \u201canybody who promises you definitive clarity on this mind-bending story should be regarded with the suspicion reserved for Instagram health experts.\u201d Ari struggles to understand how its two worlds connect, and as events in one world echo events in the other, so will many readers. \u201cMandel has engineered this uncanny novel to spark d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, to send you flipping back to passages you read too quickly, to drive you mad. But what a way to go!\u201d<\/p>\n

The Week<\/p>\n

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nSUBSCRIBE & SAVE\n<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters<\/p>\n

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week\u2019s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories – plus daily puzzles.<\/p>\n

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week\u2019s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories – plus daily puzzles.<\/p>\n

Latest Videos FromThe Week<\/p>\n

‘Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War\u2019s Most Extraordinary Spy’ by Ben Macintyre<\/p>\n

\u201cBen Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers,\u201d said Joseph Finder in The New York Times. With his new account about a Soviet spy who may have altered history, the author of Operation Mincemeat, which was adapted into a 2021 movie, \u201chas done it again.\u201d In 1981, KGB major Vladimir Kuzichkin offered to slip secrets about Soviet meddling in post-revolution Iran<\/a> to British intelligence, but not because of ideology or money. It was because he suffered from erectile dysfunction and hoped Western doctors could help. Might Iran<\/a> have fallen into Soviet hands had Viagra already existed? Macintyre floats that \u201caudacious\u201d thought, but his tale doesn\u2019t rest on such speculation.<\/p>\n

Think of Redwood as \u201can artfully constructed nonfiction equivalent to one of John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s most accomplished novels,\u201d said Andrew Nagorski in The Wall Street Journal. The author traces the life paths that brought Kuzichkin and his MI6 handler, Ian McCredie, together, making them allies in documenting how Moscow was seeking to use the communist Tudeh Party to topple Ayatollah Khomeini and install its own puppet leader. MI6, with the CIA<\/a>\u2019s approval, then handed this intel to Khomeini, knowing full well that he might kill or lock up thousands of Tudeh members Kuzichkin had identified. And that\u2019s what happened, strengthening the ayatollah\u2019s grip on power. By then, Kuzichkin had been spirited away to the U.K., where he died of a heart attack years later next to an empty bottle of vodka.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s much to like in Redwood,\u201d said Boris Starling in The Telegraph (U.K.). But \u201cthere are two minor flaws.\u201d First, the background narrative, with its abundance of characters that don\u2019t merit being named, \u201cseems at times unnecessarily complex.\u201d Second, the entire story is less exciting and fraught than the one Macintyre told in 2018\u2019s masterful The Spy and the Traitor. Still, Macintyre remains \u201cincapable of writing a dull sentence,\u201d specializing in \u201cdeliciously wry\u201d turns of phrase. In Kuzichkin, he\u2019s also found another \u201cwildly unforgettable\u201d character.<\/p>\n

Your weekly digest of stories about entertainment and leisure, delivered every Friday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘Exit Party’ by Emily St. John Mandel \u201cLet\u2019s hope that Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s gift for writing prophetic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":863816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":["post-863815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/863816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}