Mohsin Hamid, "Exit West"

Recounting events “back then,” when “the news … was full of war, and migrants, and nativists,” Hamid’s fourth novel uses the compressed power and spare language of allegory to tell an urgent story about today. Tracking the fallout of broken countries through the love story of Nadia and Saaed, Hamid, the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and a frequent contributor to journals including The New York Review of Books, follows the couple from their unnamed South Asian nation to a refugee camp near a Greek island resort, then to London, where uneven power outages give the city “dark” and “light” sides. While the world is in such turmoil that special doors magically appear and whisk people from one place to another, Hamid’s protagonists encounter empathy as well as hostility.

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