The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Mohsin Hamid's thrillingly provocative international bestseller
Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2007
Now a major film directed by Mira Nair and starring Kate Hudson and Kiefer Sutherland
'Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America . . . '
So speaks the mysterious stranger at a Lahore cafe as dusk settles. Invited to join him for tea, you learn his name and what led this speaker of immaculate English to seek you out. For he is more worldy than you might expect; better travelled and better educated. He knows the West better than you do. And as he tells you his story, of how he embraced the Western dream -- and a Western woman -- and how both betrayed him, so the night darkens. Then the true reason for your meeting becomes abundantly clear . . .
Challenging, mysterious and thrillingly tense, Mohsin Hamid's masterly The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a vital read teeming with questions and ideas about some of the most pressing issues of today's globalised, fractured world.
'Masterful . . . A multi-layered and thoroughly gripping book, which works as a poignant love story, a powerful dissection of how US imperialist machinations have turned so many people against the world's superpower - and as a thriller that subtly ratchets up the nerve-jangling tension towards an explosive ending' Metro
'Beautifully written . . . more exciting than any thriller I've read for a long time' Philip Pullman
'A brilliant book' Kiran Desai
'Admirably spare and amazingly exciting' Rachel Cooke, New Statesman
Mohsin Hamid is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His fiction has been translated into over 30 languages, received numerous awards, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has contributed essays and short stories to publications such as the Guardian, The New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, and Paris Review. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he spent part of his childhood in California, studied at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and has since lived between Lahore, London, and New York.
"A fantastic piece of work, superbly considered and controlled, with a lovely stillness and wisdom at its heart"
-- The Times
"An elegant, artful, haunting novella - a deceptively simple narrative that is in fact deeply ambiguous" -- Jo Glanville, Observer Books of the Year
"From the start, I was gripped...There's an almost delightful allegorical symmetry to the flow of events, as well as a sensuousness and finish that might belong to some other form of art: music, perhaps...Hamid manages marvellously well in creating a novel that's rendered entirely in terms of the spoken word, and governed by the shape of what's evaded or not uttered" -- Amit Chaudhuri, London Review of Books
"I read Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist with increasing admiration. It is beautifully written - what a joy it is to find such intelligent prose, such clarity of thought and exposition - and superbly constructed. The author has managed to tighten the screw of suspense almost without our being aware it is happening, and the result is a tale of enormous tension. I read a lot of thrillers - or rather I start reading a lot of thrillers, and put most of them down - but this is more exciting than any thriller I've read for a long time, as well as being a subtle and elegant analysis of the state of our world today. I was enormously impressed" -- Philip Pullman
"If a book had to be praised for its merits in defining the anxieties of our post-9/11 society, then Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist would be the one to win" -- Marta Simonetti-Whitford, Guardian Books of the Year
