Exit West

Reviews / Votes

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 * Immediately canonical * New Yorker * 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 but not yet at war, two young people meet and fall in love. They pretend not to hear the sound of bombs getting closer every night. But one day soon they will have to escape this place, running for their lives, searching for their place in the world. * Penguin * 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 * Powerful... Hamid unfolds the disintegration of civic life and the couple's poignant intimacy with vivid, economical strokes. Hamid is the master of the illuminating metaphor * Sunday Times * Wry [and] intelligent... Part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable for a world of porous borders, Exit West is a thought experiment that pivots on the crucial figure of this century: the migrant * Financial Times * A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic * GQ * Breathlessly relevant... Hamid's book could hardly be more timely; it's addictively readable and brilliantly written to boot * Mail on Sunday * Astonishing * Zadie Smith * 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 * 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 * 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 *