Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid

A topical, intoxicating parable of migration in a changed world in which we reflect with radical simplicity on life, people and identity. With magical surrealism illuminating a world of escalating discord, the poetic storytelling depicts an unsettling future that will linger in your mind.

Extract
Saeed and Nadia knew what the build-up to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over London in those days was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was a calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.
Parallels
  • The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota
  • The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
  • A Strangeness in my Mind by Orhan Pamuk
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Violence
Explicit sexual Content