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EXIT WEST by Mohsin Hamid

EXIT WEST

a novel

by Mohsin Hamid

2018/2019

Open Books--Open Minds Common Book

"From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a love story that unfolds in a world being irrevocably transformed by migration. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet--sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors--doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As violence and the threat of violence escalate, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. Exit West is an epic compressed into a slender page-turner--both completely of our time and for all time, Mohsin Hamid's most ambitious and electrifying novel yet"-- The Publisher.

Awards & Recognition

... and shortlisted for: the British Science Fiction Association Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and the Man Booker Prize.

Selected Book Reviews

El Akkad, Omar. "Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, reviewed: A masterpiece of humility and restraint," The Globe and Mail, 17 March 2017.
"At the novel's core is something more fundamental than the whims of politics – an exploration of human needs so universal, they elevate Exit West from a product of our time to something timeless."
Gilbert, Sophie. "Exit West and the Edge of Dystopia," The Atlantic. 8 March 2017.
"Hamid’s novel is both timely—a tale about refugees playing out against a global migrant crisis—and impossibly prescient. When it comes to the future, he posits, we will all be migrants, whether we hop from country to country or stay in one place until the day we die."
McNamara, James. "Flee or die." Spectator, 13 May 2017, p. 34.
"At a time when expressing the hope that refugee kids don't starve to death in camps marks one out as a 'luvvie snowflake', it's good to have a writer grab us by the lapels and shout: 'Look, we all know mass global displacement is a bit complex, but we can't just tell everyone running from war to fuck off.'
Mohsin Hamid does that (albeit more subtly) in his stunning novel,"
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. "A Refugee Crisis in a World of Open Doors," New York Times 10 March 2017.
'“Exit West” does not lead to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. All we have to do is step through it and meet them."
Sandhu, Sukhdev. "Exit West by Mohsin Hamid – magical vision of the refugee crisis". The Guardian, 12 March 2017.
"Exit West is animated – confused, some may think – by constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future. It’s a motion that mirrors that of a planet where millions are trying to slip away 'from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields'."
Swirsky, Rebecca. "Doors of perception." New Statesman, 28 Apr. 2017, p. 49.
"Mohsin Hamid's fourth novel opens as it means to go on. The twentysomething Saeed invites Nadia, a fellow student ... for coffee. Discovering that she doesn't pray, he lowers his voice to question why she wears a flowing black robe. Nadia's reply is simple. "So men don't fuck with me." Her response sets the tone for their ensuing relationship and presents in micro Exit West's premise: that people are hybrid beings with contradictory identities subject to flux."

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Open Books Open Minds - Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Open Books--Open Minds

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EXIT WEST by Mohsin Hamid

Awards & Recognition

Selected Book Reviews