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Emily St. John Mandel’s brilliant new novel “Exit Party” begins five years in the future at a party in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood where a series of mysterious, hard-to-explain events set the story in motion.

But before we begin to explore the novel, we need to address another inexplicable event: A few summers ago, this reporter briefly met Mandel at an event at the home of novelist Gabrielle Korn, and after reading and re-reading “Exit Party,” it was hard to shake the sense that Mandel had set her fictional L.A. party on the very same street at the very same house as that very real gathering.

But that couldn’t be, right?

“I added a terrace to the side of the house, but it’s absolutely the street,” says Mandel, confirming my suspicions with a laugh when asked about the party scene’s setting. “I was thinking of that house when I wrote the book … Definitely by the third revision or so, that was kind of their house.

“After they’d read the galley, they were like, ‘…Is this our house?’” says Mandel, who’d sent Korn and her wife an advance copy. “And I was like, ‘Well, it’s not not your house.’”

Korn confirmed this via email. “I noticed that the titular party itself actually felt very familiar, too — my wife and I throw an annual garden party at our home in Silver Lake with our friend Lauren Cerand, who is a literary publicist,” she wrote in part. “Emily has always attended.”

“While the house is not exactly mine, since we lack both a side balcony and a portal to another dimension, it’s similar enough that it feels like she planted a little gift for me,” Korn wrote. “Such is the joy of befriending one of your favorite authors!”

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