Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Nadia and Saeed meet at an evening class and fall in love while the city around them swells with refugees and slides towards crisis. When they can no longer ignore and endure the situation around them – the bombs, the shootings, the blackouts – they’re forced to leave Saeed’s father and step through one of the black doors that are appearing all over the city: doors to Greece, London, San Francisco.

It’s a powerful story beautifully told. Hamid’s prose is casually vivid: sentences unspool with just enough off-hand detail to make the life they describe seem real. The simplicity of his technique amplifies the emotional intensity of the situation, as ties to family, tradition, and society begin at first to fray, and then to fail, and then to disappear. 

Exit West is a book full of beginnings: falling in love; leaving the city; surviving the camps; surviving the West. This novel’s extraordinary feat is to humanise and localise the crises of a changing world. It records the moments and pressures that push Nadia and Saeed from first love to duty, then from exhaustion to irritation and finally to the moment when they are no longer in love at all. Hamid does not dramatise any of this. He doesn't need to sculpt a story arc, and this is no sanitised survival tale. He's found a simple voice for a complex mess of fear and desire, and it rings true. [Galen O'Hanlon]