Exit West: A Novel

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One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

WINNER OF THE 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

10 BEST BOOKS OF 2017, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

FINALIST FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE, THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS, and THE KIRKUS AWARD 


“Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world. It is also a possible world.
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." --Viet Thanh Nguyen, The New York Times Book Review (cover)

“In spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy. He shows just how swiftly ordinary life — with all its banal rituals and routines — can morph into the defensive crouch of life in a war zone. … [and] how insidiously violence alters the calculus of daily life. … By mixing the real and the surreal, and using old fairy-tale magic, Hamid has created a fictional universe that captures the global perils percolating beneath today’s headlines.” ––
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 

“Lyrical and urgent, the globalist novel evokes the dreams and disillusionments that follow Saeed and Nadia….and peels away the dross of bigotry to expose the beauty of our common humanity.”—O, the Oprah Magazine

“A beautiful and very detailed look at what it means to be an immigrant…An incredible book.” –Sarah Jessica Parker on Read it Forward

“A little like the eerily significant Margaret Atwood novel, this love story amid the rubble of violence, uncertainty, and modernity feels at once otherworldly and all too real.” New York Magazine’s The Strategist

"This is the best writing of Hamid's career… Readers will find themselves going back and savoring each paragraph several times before moving on. He's that good. . . . Breathtaking.”
—NPR.org

“Nearly every page reflects the tangible impact of life during wartime—not just the blood and gunsmoke of daily bombardments, but the quieter collateral damage that seeps in. The true magic of [
Exit West] is how it manages to render it all in a narrative so moving, audacious, and indelibly human.”–Entertainment Weekly, “A rating”

“Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants. … But, still, he depicts the world as resolutely beautiful and, at its core, unchanged. The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions.” —
NewYorker.com

"No novel is really about the cliche called 'the human condition,' but good novels expose and interpret the particular condition of the humans in their charge, and this is what Hamid has achieved here. If in its physical and perilous immediacy Nadia and Saeed’s condition is alien to the mass of us, Exit West makes a final, certain declaration of affinity: 'We are all migrants through time.'”—Washington Post

“Skillful and panoramic from the outset... [A] meticulously crafted, ambitious story of many layers, many geopolitical realities, many lives and circumstances...Here is the world, he seems to be saying, the direction we’re hurtling in. How are we going to mitigate the damage we’ve done?” –The New York Review of Books

“Like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but set in the real world. You’ll be hearing about it, so get into it now.”
—TheSkimm

“Spellbinding.” Buzzfeed

“Hamid graphically explores a fundamental and important ontological question: Is it possible for us to conceive of ourselves at all, except in juxtaposition to an “other”?... What is remarkable about Hamid’s narrative is that war is not, in fact, able to marginalize the “precious mundanity” of everyday life. Instead — and herein lies Hamid’s genius as a storyteller — the mundanity, the minor joys of life, like bringing flowers to a lover, smoking a joint, and looking at stars, compete with the horrors of war.” –Los Angeles Times

“In an era when powerful ruling groups — often in the minority — are gripped by a sense of religious and ethnic nativism, Mohsin offers these two, the millions they represent, and us, comfort: that plausible, desirable futures can be imagined, that new tribes may be formed, and that life will go on...  If we are looking for the story of our time, one that can project a future that is both more bleak and more hopeful than that which we can yet envision, this novel is faultless.” –Boston Globe

“[A] slender treasure of a novel.” –NPR's Book Concierge

"Terrifying, hopeful, and all too relevant."—People Magazine

“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… This book blew the top off my head. It’s at once terrifying and, in the end, oddly hopeful.”
–Ayelet Waldman, New York Times Book Review

"If there is one book everyone should read ASAP, it is Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West...Short, unsentimental, deeply intimate, and so very powerful." Goop

“Spare and haunting, it’s magical realism meets the all-too-real.” –W Magazine

“Taut but haunting.”–Vanity Fair

"Powerfully evokes the violence and anxiety of lives lived ‘under the drone-crossed sky.’” —Time Magazine

“Hamid’s timely and spare new novel confronts the inevitability of mass global immigration, the unbroken cycle of violence and the indomitable human will to connect and love.” —Huffington Post

“A great romance that is also a story of refugees; this couldn’t be more timely.” —Flavorwire

Exit West is a compelling read that will make you think about the times we are living in right now.” –PopSugar

"Beautiful." –The Rumpus

“Eerily prescient.” Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker.com

“[A] thought experiment that pivots on the crucial figure of this century: the migrant… Hamid’s cautious, even fastidious prose makes the sudden flashes of social breakdown all the more affecting...Evading the lure of both the utopian and the dystopian, Exit West makes some rough early sketches of the world that must come if we (or is it ‘you’?) are to avoid walling out the rest of the human race.”–Financial Times

“Exit West operates on another plane… Beautiful and poetic even at its most devastating.”
Book Riot

“Raw, poetic, and frighteningly prescient.”
BBC.com

“Timely and resonant.”
Publisher's Weekly, Top 10 Most-Anticipated Literary Fiction of 2017

About the Author

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the international bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize. His first novel, Moth Smoke, won the Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. His essays, a number of them collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

Review:

4.6 out of 5

92.50% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars The Future Is Now

T.C. · August 20, 2022

Mohsin Hamid opens his story in a fictitious nation resembling an amalgam of Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen where distant revolts in the countryside soon engulf an entire nation and where every citizen has to find a way out.Saeed and Nadia are two such people who are able to work around the growing chaos and death until Saeed’s mother is brutally murdered. They hear of a black door nearby, one so dark that even light can’t penetrate it, which can somehow transport them immediately to another location on the globe. But as this door and others like it begin to appear so also do governmental soldiers who try to restrict or forbid access to those deemed undesirable by destination lands. Payment becomes a necessity to enter through newly created ones and nobody leaving knows just exactly where they’ll end up and in what condition.In a way we are all migrants, refugees, always seeking better conditions, hoping for better futures, looking for an ideal just beyond the horizon. The author not only knows this but takes it a step further into a potentially promising future as everyone, refugee and native, becomes impacted.Hamid’s book is a compelling story, not one to be tied up in political semantics but in the very humanity of living in constant change. His views of human nature are likewise very revealing. In describing Saeed’s parents in their earlier married years a very human and humorously vivid scene occurs.“He smoked and she said she didn’t, but often, when the ash of his seemingly forgotten cigarette grew impossibly extended, she took it from his fingers, trimmed it softly against an ashtray, and pulled a long and rather rakish drag before returning it, daintily.”It’s scenes like these with which Hamid seasons his story that elicits the poetry and the humanity of a happily married couple, allowing us to see them, identify with them and recall people from our past who resemble them.He is a keen yet sensitive observer of the human spirit with its contradictions as well as its dreams. I am able to open the book to any page and find examples.After a very long day of hard physical work in construction, each at different sites, Nadia and Saeed arrive home. As they practically collapse near each other they realize that they are physically touching one another.“Her leg and arm touched Saeed’s leg and arm, and he was warm through his clothing, and he sat in a way that suggested exhaustion. But he also managed a tired smile, which was encouraging, and when she opened her fist to reveal what was inside, as she had once before done on her rooftop a brief lifetime ago, and he saw the weed, he started to laugh, almost soundlessly, a gentle rumble, and he said, his voice uncoiling like a slow, languid exhaustion of marijuana-scented smoke, ‘Fantastic.”This is a story not to be missed by the very gifted author of Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

4.0 out of 5 stars SciFi Refugees

D.D. · August 25, 2024

Interesting book. I normally read mostly SciFi, but this was recommended to me, so I tried it. Very well written and gives his insight into how one would cope with losing one's home. With a dash of SciFi. 😉

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I was expecting.

C.A. · August 4, 2017

After reading reviews of Exit West, it jumped to the top of my "to read" list. I was looking forward to the possibilities of where the story could go. For me, the hype and anticipation was better than the book.To be fair, the book made me think. There were several lines in the text that were beautifully written and thought-provoking. The descriptions of life in a war torn country before they discovered the doors were empathetic making me feel as if I was there. I enjoyed the budding relationship between Saeed and Nadia. For me, this first part of the story felt like an insider's peek at the people behind, suffering, and involved in the real life war stories we hear in the news. For this reason, I appreciate the author's tale.Then came the doors and the escape - gripping to read. But then, my expectations and the actual story diverged. I was expecting to find the characters building a new, happier life. With time/space transporting doors, the possibilities of roads to travel are endless. Unfortunately, the author went down a less optimistic path in the book. I understand he was sending a message that while change may be necessary, It isn't always better or without cost. There were deep questions raised: How should immigrants and refugees be treated? What toll do survival and migration have on a person and their relationships? What part does religion play in a person's outlook on life? While these things are important to contemplate and discuss, it wasn't what I was expecting.I would have given this book a higher rating because I appreciate books that make me think, but there were three things that really bothered me as a reader. First, there were many instances (especially toward the end) where the author had half page run-on sentences. These are hard to read and follow. Second, the author added in, from time to time, short tales of other people in other parts of the world experiencing things apart from the main characters. These vignettes were never tied back to the plot line or characters; they were superfluous. Finally, the last chapter jumps ahead 50 years and then just ends. There is no explanation of what happened during that half century. I found that disappointing and frustrating. The last few chapters and ending made me feel like the author didn't know where to take the story and just kind of gave up.I am glad I read the book, and I think my book club will have many good things to discuss, but I'm not sure it is a book I will recommend to others.

Super

G. · May 21, 2024

Wszystko w porządku

Original

A. · March 2, 2024

One of the most original novelas I have read lately. It is the mix between a fantasy and a social plot (refugees)

Quite extraordinary

C. · June 7, 2022

Although the reader find many similarities with our present and troubled worlds, the allegories take you on a very human journey. The writing is as light as a feather but always hits the mark. I liked all of it, from the hard hitting beginning to the hopeful but nostalgic end.

Ottimo

L. · October 5, 2020

Arrivato in perfette condizioni e anche prima del previsto. L'ho acquistato perché parte del programma per un esame all'università.

An enticing novel

G. · October 23, 2017

The author has a strong voice that makes you drift through a magical, yet familiar world. Though the main characters are faced with unfamiliar adversities, they also encounter relationship problems that we face everyday: fear of strangers, fear of becoming strangers. A pleasant read.

Exit West: A Novel

4.1

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