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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE & WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
"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
The New York Times bestselling novel: an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands, from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the forthcoming The Last White Man .
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.
Author Notes
Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was published in ten languages, won a Betty Trask Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays and journalism have appeared in Time, the New York Times and the Guardian, among others. His latest novel is The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) published by Penguin. He will be featured at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2015 program. He is the author of Exit West, which in 2018, won the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hamid's (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) trim yet poignant fourth novel addresses similar themes as his previous work and presents a unique perspective on the global refugee crisis. In an unidentified country, young Saeed and burqa-wearing Nadia flee their home after Saeed's mother is killed by a stray bullet and their city turns increasingly dangerous due to worsening violent clashes between the government and guerillas. The couple joins other migrants traveling to safer havens via carefully guarded doors. Through one door, they wind up in a crowded camp on the Greek Island of Mykonos. Through another, they secure a private room in an abandoned London mansion populated mostly by displaced Nigerians. A third door takes them to California's Marin County. In each location, their relationship is by turns strengthened and tested by their struggle to find food, adequate shelter, and a sense of belonging among emigrant communities. Hamid's storytelling is stripped down, and the book's sweeping allegory is timely and resonant. Of particular importance is the contrast between the migrants' tenuous daily reality and that of the privileged second- or third-generation native population who'd prefer their new alien neighbors to simply disappear. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME Entertainment. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In an unnamed city with strict social mores, young Nadia is a rebel, an atheist who chooses to live and work independently. In religious and unassuming Saeed she finds the perfect companion. As the two fall in love, their romance is tinged with a sense of urgency and inevitability as the city falls to militia, and basic freedoms and food quickly become rarities. When the situation turns dire, Saeed and Nadia decide to migrate as thousands already have and cobble together every last bit of their savings to find safe passage out. Caught in the whirlpool of refugees from around the world, Saeed and Nadia are tossed around like flotsam, the necessity of survival binding them together more than any starry-eyed notion of romance ever could. If at times the story of refugees facing no easy choice feels derivative, Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 2013) smooths over such wrinkles with spellbinding writing and a story of a relationship that sucks its own marrow dry for sustenance. The concept of the door is a powerful, double-edged metaphor here, representing a portal leading to a promised land that when closed, however, condemns one to fates from which there is no escape.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE IMAGINEERS OF WAR: The Untold Story of Darpa, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, by Sharon Weinberger. (Vintage, $17.) Few know much about Darpa - populated by a "procession of nuts, opportunists and salesmen," Weinberger tells us - but the group helped shape modern life and modern warfare. Some notable inventions: stealth aircraft, armed drones, Agent Orange and even the internet. EXIT WEST, by Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $16.) In this elegant meditation on refuge, exile and home, a couple flee their unnamed country riven by civil war. Hamid weaves the surreal into his tale: Magic doors separate the dangers of home from the perils of a new life. The novel, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017, is this month's pick for the PBS NewsHourNew York Times Book Club. STEVEN SPIELBERG: A Life in Films, by Molly Haskell. (Yale, $15.) A feminist critic's take on the filmmaker focuses on his Jewish identity. Praising the match between biographer and subject, our reviewer, Lisa Schwarzbaum, wrote, "The exploration here is lively, the critic is deeply informed and she approaches her mandate with a calmness of inquiry that is a gift often bestowed on the outsider anthropologist impervious to tribal influences." UNIVERSAL HARVESTER, by John Darnielle. (Picador, $16.) At the local Video Hut where Jeremy works as a clerk, someone begins splicing violent, vaguely malevolent scenes into the tapes, and his Idaho town is shaken. As his friends and family are consumed by the phenomenon, Jeremy pursues the mystery, culminating in a final reckoning at the remote farm where the scenes were filmed. Darnielle, the lead singer for the band the Mountain Goats, counteracts the sinister with acute sensitivity in this story, his second novel. WHY TIME FLIES: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, by Alan Burdick. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) Burdick, a New Yorker staff writer, investigates how we experience the passage of time: varying perceptions of duration; how humans agreed on the common measure of an hour. His account doesn't satisfy every question, but it opens up new lines of inquiry into the subtle and profound ways humans process time. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US, by Stephanie Powell Watts. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) A riff on "The Great Gatsby," this debut novel centers on the fates and fortunes of AfricanAmerican families in modern-day North Carolina As our reviewer, Jade Chang, put it, "Watts is interested in what black people are allowed to want - and allow themselves to want - in 21st-century America."
School Library Journal Review
A young couple meet and fall in love as their city disintegrates into violence in this spare, allegorical novel. Nadia is a free spirit who lives independently, while Saeed is faithful to the traditions of family and prayer. Any semblance of normal life, to say nothing of courtship, is obliterated by the danger surrounding them, so Nadia and Saeed decide they must find a way to escape. They learn of doors, fantastical portals that defy the laws of physics and grant passage to distant locations. It seems a stroke of great fortune when Nadia and Saeed access a door that takes them to a Greek island. But the respite is illusory. The world's population is on the move, and desperate migrants like Nadia and Saeed are swarming through doors in overwhelming numbers. The pair's love is tested as they ponder strategies for survival. Should they stay, or find another door? Hamid describes with fluid insight the displaced lovers' despair and longing for stability. His use of contemporary details such as cell phone dependence will remind readers that Nadia and Saeed are but a few steps removed from any college-age couple fleeing a homeland at war. VERDICT This short but potent work offers teens a visceral understanding of the world's refugee crisis. Those who are aware of the current political climate regarding immigration will be moved by this poignant love story.-Diane Colson, formerly at City College, Gainesville, FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Folio Academy members have overwhelmingly said prize should be closed to US novelists An overwhelming majority of authors in the Folio Academy, which includes Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith among its ranks, have called upon the Man Booker prize to revert to admitting UK, Irish and Commonwealth writers only, over fears of a new American dominance emerging in the prize. Three years since the Man Booker began allowing any author writing in English and published in the UK to enter, 99% of Folio Academy members who responded to the question have said that the Booker should change its rules again, with most responses citing the new ubiquity of US authors in the prize's longlists. After the 2011 Man Booker chair of judges, Stella Rimington controversially stressed prioritising "readability" and books that "zip along", the Rathbones Folio prize was established that year as a direct challenge to the prestigious Booker. The Folio, which set out to reward "daunting" fiction by any author writing in English and is overseen by its academy of 300-odd members, was first awarded to US author George Saunders in 2013 ; that same year, the Man Booker prize announced it would widen its remit to include any author writing in English. Saunders himself would later win the Booker in 2017, making him the second US winner in a row since the rule was implemented in 2014 - an ill omen for some critics, who believe the character of the prize has been altered by the presence of weighty US writers at the expense of unknown authors in Commonwealth countries, who previously benefitted from a Booker boost. Author John Banville, who won the Booker in 2005 and originally supported the new rule, revealed he has since changed his mind. "The prize was unique in its original form, but has lost that uniqueness. It is now just another prize among prizes. I am convinced the administrators should take the bold step of conceding the change was wrong, and revert," he said. Golden Hill author Francis Spufford said that as major US literary prizes tended to only allow US citizens to enter, the same protections should be extended to authors from other countries. "The effect of opening the Man Booker to American writers without any corresponding shift in the rules for the Pulitzer, National Book Awards, etc, is therefore to diminish opportunities to British, Irish, Indian, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and South African writers while making very little appreciable difference in the US," he said. "In fact it can be argued that with the Americanisation of the Booker, American readers have partially lost a conduit to excellent writing which they would not otherwise have come across. I don't see any winners in the present situation." British novelist Tessa Hadley said she felt that the Booker's character had changed. "The Man Booker used to provide a point of focus each year for British and Commonwealth fiction: a sense that this had some identity-in-difference, and that British and Commonwealth novels were in some sense 'talking to one another'... now it's as though we're perceived - and perceive ourselves - as only a subset of US fiction, lost in its margins - and, eventually, this dilution of the community of writers plays out in the writing." However, critic Sam Leith remained in favour of the change. "I think that - angry though it has made a lot of UK writers and publishers - there's a clear literary sense in the Man Booker having as its constituency the English language, rather than a territorial remit based on a semi-defunct postcolonial trading bloc," he said. Ahead of the 2018 Rathbones Folio prize revealing its shortlist on Tuesday night, prize co-founder and literary agent Andrew Kidd said the data gathered from the academy would be offered to the Booker Foundation, which manages the prize. "It's up to them to decide how to proceed, it is a tricky one," he said. "Having canvassed the academy, we've had this very quick and unified response. I can see they are in a bind - having made this decision, it would be awkward to reverse it. But there is a sense, in some quarters, that voices that might have been heard aren't getting oxygen any more." Kidd said that while the Folio was a response to "frustration" among writers over the Booker in 2011, the relationship between the two prizes was now "collegiate", with the Folio further differentiating itself in 2017 by also admitting non-fiction. "We're not saying they should change it back. It is up to them to decide. This is not about us versus the Booker, though it maybe was at the start," he said. In February, 30 publishers signed a letter urging the Man Booker organisers to reverse the change, or risk a "homogenised literary future". The Booker Foundation responded by saying there was no evidence that the prize's diversity had been affected. "The trustees believe that this mission cannot be constrained or compromised by national boundaries," it said. The 2018 Rathbones Folio prize shortlist Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (Viking) Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber) Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton) Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry (Jonathan Cape) Once Upon A Time In The East by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus) Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (4th Estate) The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard (Harvill Secker) White Tears by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton) - Sian Cain.
Library Journal Review
"We are all migrants through time," observes Man Booker Prize short-lister Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). The impulses driving such a movement, especially when rooted in violent conflict, is at the core of Hamid's exceptional fourth novel. In an unnamed city (not unlike the author's native Lahore, Pakistan), Saeed and Nadia meet, find love, and expect to share a future, but a militant takeover forces them to flee their homeland. Hamid reveals their tenuous journey from a dreamlike distance that perfectly blends reality with fablelike parable. For example, escape happens through "doors" only accessible via the right contact at the right price. While focusing the narrative spotlight on his lovers-on-the-run, Hamid regularly interrupts the couple's peregrinations with snapshot interludes-a potential murder in Tokyo, a woman threatened in Vienna, an aging grandmother in Palo Alto-that serve as reminders that life (and death) continues for everyone else, everywhere else, every which way. Both mellifluous and jarring, this novel is a profound meditation on the unpredictable temporality of human existence and the immeasurable cost of widespread enmity. VERDICT Libraries would do well to acquire this and all of Hamid's extraordinary titles. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian -BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.