Exit West: SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017

Review 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 Product Description SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 One of Barack Obama's top ten books of 2017 WINNER of the LA Times Prize for Fiction Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards for Best Novel The Times Top 10 Bestseller Guardian Top 10 Bestseller The New York Times Top 5 Bestseller Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2018 and finalist for the Neustadt Prize 2018 'Mixing the real and the surreal, using old fairy-tale magic... Compelling, crystalline, unnervingly dystopian' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 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 star-gazing. This is their story: a l