Exit West: SHORTLISTED for the Man Booker Prize 2017 - Hardcover

Hamid, Mohsin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241290082 ISBN 13: 9780241290088

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2017

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017

SHORTLISTED FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION

NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION

Winner of the Aspen Words Literary Prize

*One of Barack Obama's top ten books of 2017*
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

'Spare, crystalline prose, mixing the real and the surreal and using old fairy-tale magic... An unnervingly dystopian portrait of what might lie down the road' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Nadia and Saeed are two ordinary young people, attempting to do an extraordinary thing - to fall in love - in a world turned upside down. Theirs will be a love story but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow, of a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.

Civil war has come to the city which Nadia and Saeed call home. Before long they will need to leave their motherland behind - when the streets are no longer useable and the unknown is safer than the known. They will join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world . . .

About this title

Review:

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)

From the Back Cover:

'Beautifully written, a subtle and elegant analysis of the state of our world today. Such intelligent prose, such clarity of thought and exposition . . . I was enormously impressed' Philip Pullman on The Reluctant Fundamentalist

'Extraordinary. . . Not often does one find a first novel that has the power of imagination and skill to orchestrate personal and public themes of these consequences and achieve a chord that reverberates in one's mind. Of the best novels I have read this year' Nadine Gordimer on Moth Smoke

'Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious writers of his generation. When you reach the end, you want to go straight back to the beginning. And yes - that does mean you.' Telegraph on How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0241290082
• ISBN 13: 9780241290088
• Binding: Board book
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240