Exit West

Reviews / Votes

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 *