Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan. He has lived in London, New York, and California. He pubished his fourth novel in March 2017, Exit West. Discover the author, his book, as well as ratings and reviews on the latter.

Mohsin Hamid‘s writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, selected as winner or finalist of more than twenty-five awards, and translated into over thirty-five languages.

Mohsin grew up in Lahore, Pakistan. He moved to the United States at the age of 18 to study at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He has spent about half his life in Pakistan and much of the rest in England and The United States. He currently lives in London.

He has worked as a management consultant in New York, and later as a freelance journalist back in Lahore.

Before Exit West, Mohsin Hamid wrote and published three novels, Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and a book of essays entitled Discontent and Its Civilisations (2014).

His first novel, Moth Smoke, was winner of a Betty Trask Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. It was made into a television mini-series in Pakistan and an operetta in Italy, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000.

In 2007 his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was published and shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2008, it won the South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) and the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). A short story based on the novel was also published in The Paris Review in 2006.

Hamid‘s third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), won the Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the KLF Embassy of France Prize and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award.

Now let’s learn more about his latest book, Exit West (2017), which was:

. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

. FINALIST FOR THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZE

Synopsis:

“A breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time.” –NPR.org

“It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful.” –Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review

“Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” –Entertainment Weekly, “A” rating

“A finalist for the Man Booker Prize and a New York Times bestseller, the astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands.

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, and are soon cloistered in a 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 the violence escalates, 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 follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

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