Exit West

doomed rock climber: I think it s personal. Each of us has his own way. Or . . . her own way. Nobody s perfect. And, in any case

She interrupted him. I don t pray, she said. She continued to gaze at him steadily.

Then she said, Maybe another time.

He watched as she walked out to the student parking area and there, instead of covering her head with a black cloth, as he expected, she donned a black motorcycle helmet that had been locked to a scuffed-up hundred-ish cc trail bike, snapped down her visor, straddled her ride, and rode off, disappearing with a controlled rumble into the gathering dusk.

 
The next day, at work, Saeed found himself unable to stop thinking of Nadia. Saeed s employer was an agency that specialized in the placement of outdoor advertising. They owned billboards all around the city, rented others, and struck deals for further space with the likes of bus lines, sports stadiums, and proprietors of tall buildings.

The agency occupied both floors of a converted townhouse and had over a dozen employees. Saeed was among the most junior, but his boss liked him and had tasked him with turning around a pitch to a local soap company that had to go out by email before five. Normally Saeed tried to do copious amounts of online research and customize his presentations as much as possible. It s not a story if it doesn t have an audience, his boss was fond of saying, and for Saeed this meant trying to show a client that his firm truly understood their business, could really get under their skin and see things from their point of view.

But today, even though the pitch was important every pitch was important: the economy was sluggish from mounting unrest and one of the first costs clients seeme

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