Exit West

An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.This is Nadia. She is fiercely independent with an excellent sense of humour and a love of smoking alone on her balcony late at night.This is Saeed. He is sweet and shy and kind to strangers. He also has a balcony but he uses his for stargazing.This is their story- a love story, but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow. Saeed and Nadia are falling in love, and their city is falling apart. Here is a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.Exit West is a heartfelt and radical act of hope - a novel to restore your faith in humanity and in the power of imagination.

“Astonishing”

As with the very best literature, its crystalline readability fast eclipses its topicality Mail on Sunday
[A] devastating portrait of victims of war, creating a singular parable about modernity, migration and the individual's place in the world The Guardian
A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. A novel that fuses the real with the surreal - perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet The New York Times
No conventional love story. [An] exceptionally moving and powerful novel The Guardian
Publisher's description. In an unnamed city swollen by refugees, two young people fall in love. One day soon they will have to leave their homeland, running for their lives, searching for their place in the world. Penguin
Powerful, vivid, poignant... Hamid is the master Sunday Times

Writing in spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A love story as spare, haunting and spiritually powerful as a haiku. All my life I will remember Nadia and Saeed, their humanity against a surreal, broken landscape. Exit West is Hamid's finest book -- Kiran Desai
Imaginative, inventive, graceful... Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and imagine a better world New York Times Book Review
A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic GQ
Impressive... Exit West confirms Hamid's reputation as a brilliant ventriloquist who is deeply engaged with the most pressing issues of our time -- Andrew Motion (Book of the Week) Guardian
-- Zadie Smith

Immediately canonical

New Yorker
Part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable, Exit West is a thought experiment that pivots on the crucial figure of this century: the migrant Financial Times
Exit West packs such an emotional wallop you will be thinking about it for days afterwards. For Hamid is not only telling a story, he is asking what sort of a world we want to live in. Editor's Choice, the Bookseller
It's a terrific, beautifully constructed, important novel of our time. This is what we expect fiction to do: to examine our age but also to cast an eye on the past and - very brilliantly in this case - on the future too. I love it. Mirza Waheed
Exit West is a masterpiece. It stretches the boundaries of the real just enough to make a point about the state of immigrants and refugees in the contemporary world. But it's very much grounded in reality. It's a beautiful book. Michael Chabon
Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious writers of his generation Telegraph
A man born to write -- Dave Eggers
The voice of a changing continent. A writer at the top of his game Metro

Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for the New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Discontents and Its Civilizations. Born and raised mostly in Lahore, he has since also lived in London and New York.

'One of the year's most significant literary works' New York Times In a city far away, bombs and assassinations shatter lives every day. Yet even here, hope renews itself, welling up through the rubble. Somewhere in this city, two young people are smiling, hesitating, sharing cheap cigarettes, speaking softly then boldly, falling in love. As the violence worsens and escape feels ever more necessary, they hear rumour of mysterious black doors appearing all over the city, all over the world. To walk through a door is to find a new life - perhaps in Greece, in London, in California - and to lose the old one forever . . . What does it mean to leave your only home behind? Can you belong to many places at once? And when the hour comes and the door stands open before you - will you go? 'Thrilling, urgent, gorgeously written' Metro 'A masterpiece' Michael Chabon 'Addictively readable and brilliantly written. Fantastic' Mail on Sunday 'Stunning. First-rate literature: a work of beauty that will make you think and feel' Spectator 'Hamid's finest book' Kiran Desai

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