Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, Exit West is a daring, inventive love story. Travelling from the Middle East to London and beyond, Hamid imagines the potential for a world without borders.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
Nadia and Saeed are two ordinary young people, attempting to do an extraordinary thing - to fall in love - in a world turned upside down. Theirs will be a love story but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow, of a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.
Civil war has come to the city which Nadia and Saeed call home. Before long they will need to leave their motherland behind - when the streets are no longer useable and the unknown is safer than the known. They will join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world...
An extraordinary story of desire and hope, travelling from the Middle East to London and beyond, this is a love story that considers what makes ordinary people flee their homes and how the world might change if borders were broken down. A ground-breaking and stunningly inventive novel from the bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted author of the Waterstones bestseller, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780241979068
Number of pages: 240
Weight: 173 g
Dimensions: 198 x 130 x 15 mm
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
Astonishing - 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
Nadia and Saeed are young people in an unnamed city (my feeling is that it is based on Syria or somewhere similar in the area but that feeling would probably change with whatever war was in the news...) who, like... More
Set against a backdrop of war, migration, and a dramatically changing world, this is a love story unlike any I have ever read.
Exit West tells of a world where doors have begun to open, allowing free passage between...
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I received a free copy of this novel from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
Nadia and Saeed, a young couple living in an unidentified city packed with refugees and imminently threatened by war, attempt to...
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