FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2017, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE “A breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time.” —NPR “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 … 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
A New York Times bestseller, the astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands.
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.
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This slim novel is spare, brutal, and beautiful. In an unnamed but clearly Middle Eastern country, we watch as Nadia and Saeed fall in love even as the world crashes and burns around them, and then we follow them to refugee camps and shantytowns as they seek safety from war and violence and try to build their lives and their identities.
The magical realism element — doors that open up and allow migrants and refugees to transport to unknown, foreign places — makes this a different kind of refugee book. Instead of focusing on the horrors of the migration itself, the author helps the reader feel the discomfort and terror of adjusting to new places, of being “other.”
I’m not a fan of Hemingway and there were times that the prose felt Hemingwayesque to me, but here I didn’t mind it. The terse writing and omniscient point of view felt necessary for this work.
We first watch the country fall to sectarian violence. We feel the wrench as side characters casually come to terrible ends — a shop owner beheaded “nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort,” a mother who is looking in her car for a lost earring killed by “a stray heavy-calibre round passing through the windscreen… and taking with it a quarter of her head,” an upstairs neighbor shot for his last name and left long enough that a bloodstain appears on the ceiling. None of this violence is gratuitous, none over the top, just background to the courtship of the young lovers, as the parable marches ahead.
We follow them to Greece, then the United Kingdom, then the United States, though magical doors. We watch how the “nativists” cut off the migrants and thereby prevent any possibility of integration. The migrants band together, as if they are suits in a deck of cards, for security and comfort and necessity, in these dystopian settings. Even the “natives” in each new place are divided — volunteers who want to help and men with tanks and machine guns penning them in. They are caught up in a mass of unmoored humanity, struggling for survival, “adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing” — including a sense of self identity.
A sharp, piercing fable perfect for today’s world.
EXIT WEST was haunting, lyrical, epic, and I will be thinking about its themes for weeks to come. Highly recommended.
This is a touching story of a young couple’s relationship as it weathers a militant uprising and a series of ensuing dislocations. I enjoyed seeing today’s world (and maybe a world we are heading towards) through the couple’s eyes.
This little novel packed a huge punch. It’s not often so much is said with so little. By unshackling the reader from exact place, race and time, the story takes on a weird warning, that this is indeed the future we are moving to. A great novel, best I’ve read this year.
This is a brilliant book giving us a sense of what it’s like to live, breathe, fall in love, in city torn up by war.
I voluntarily received an ARC of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid in exchange for an honest review.
Exit West is not my typical genre for pleasure reading. Honestly, the only books similar to this one I’ve read were on assigned reading lists in high school, but the blurb intrigued me, so I decided to give it a chance. Hamid’s prose beautifully tells the captivating and trying story of Saeed and Nadia during a conflict that is still currently our world. It was very interesting to read about the conflict in the middle east and the refugee debate from someone on the other side. This book will definitely make you think about some of the current issues in our world.
A really good and entertaining read.
Beautiful, sad, and brilliant. Hamid’s story follows a young couple who must escape their war-torn Middle-Eastern city and live in migrant cities across the world learning to cope with their loss of a sense of home while they grow closer together and farther apart. With the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book was poignant and affecting. Hamid writes with a detached intimacy, like from the viewpoint of a drone, the kind that bombed Nadia and Sayed’s city, as it hovers over the couple during their most challenging and intimate moments. The prose is simple and repetitive with long sentences, creating a rhythm and numbness that permeates the novel, similar to Murakami. This style will divide readers. This book has many one and two star reviews and many five stars. The atmospheric and stylistic choices will either absorb the reader or create a disconnect. It completely worked for me. The prose was brilliantly purposeful and I was able to easily get on Hamid’s wavelength. For a glimpse of a refugee experience or for an examination not a young couple who goes through and grows from a traumatic experience together, this short novel is simple and beautiful.
Captivating, but there are holes in the telling that some would like filled others find these jokes to be the stuff of intrigue, a little fear, and mystery. Truly a relationship story that is both realistic and predictable. Leaves one wondering.
Interesting look at the struggles of people from different cultures.
Interesting take on magical realism. Brings real relationships and warfare/political conflict in with a touch of escapism. I enjoyed it, but was never truly enraptured by the book. The plot lacked enthusiasm in how pragmatic it was.
Many will appreciate this well-written and original book more than I.
Well written, but difficult to understand it’s purpose.
This book gives a realistic image of the immigrant experience from the middle east.
This book was chosen as book club read at my local library. A romance set in unnamed war torn city in Middle East. A couple find each other and as fighting escalates, they decide to migrate. The story of their migration is where the fantasy comes in. Instead of details such as the how of getting out of their country into another, but rather how the move affects their relationship. The book has a hopeful ending for all immigrants.
creative take on immigration. reminiscent of the creativity of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
In this troubling time when fascistic administrations are closing doors of entry to immigrants and folks seeking asylum from poverty, persecution, tyranny, and danger, Exit West opens our eyes to the plight of those deemed “other” — it could be Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan — any country that treat their people with unimagined brutality — and because of that, are forced to leave their homelands. The metaphor of doors opening (and closing) in this stunning novel, doors that magically transport their characters through time and different geographical locations, vividly portrayed through the youthful lives and eyes of Nadia and Saed, left me with feeling sad, rageful and in awe. Rage because no human being, whatever their beliefs, whatever the color of their skin, whatever their country of origin should be treated inhumanely, as “other.” We are all “other.” I was also left feeling respect and awe for the current group of immigrants, because of their courage, resilience, and perseverance.
Not sure what the hype is all about. I did finish it but found it strange. Did give me a better understanding of the refugee experience.
Helps one to understand the incredible hardships refugees face, and to have compassion for those who have to leave war torn countries in order to stay alive.
Fabulous! So well written – the prose is exquisite – the kind of book where I mark so many pages as ones that I have to go back and re-read just to enjoy the words on the page. A wonderful combination of magical realism and some dystopian features with a realistic portrayal of the world-wide refugee crisis. Makes me want to go and now read all his other work.