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 *