Exit West

Reviews

As with the very best literature, its crystalline readability fast eclipses its topicality [A] devastating portrait of victims of war, creating a singular parable about modernity, migration and the individual's place in the world 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 No conventional love story. [An] exceptionally moving and powerful novel 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. Powerful, vivid, poignant... Hamid is the master

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

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 Imaginative, inventive, graceful... Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and imagine a better world A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic Impressive... Exit West confirms Hamid's reputation as a brilliant ventriloquist who is deeply engaged with the most pressing issues of our time Astonishing

Immediately canonical

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 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. 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. 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. Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious writers of his generation A man born to write The voice of a changing continent. A writer at the top of his game Expand reviews