SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZEFINALIST FOR THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZEA NEW YORK TIMES AND TIME MAGAZINE "BEST BOOK OF 2017""A breathtaking novel...[that] arrives at an urgent time."...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZEFINALIST FOR THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZEA NEW YORK TIMES AND TIME MAGAZINE "BEST BOOK OF 2017""A breathtaking novel...[that] arrives at an urgent time."...
Due to publisher restrictions, your digital library cannot purchase additional copies of this title. We apologize if there is a long holds list. You may want to see if other editions of this title are available from your digital library instead.
Due to publisher restrictions, your digital library cannot purchase additional copies of this title. We apologize if there is a long holds list. You may want to see if other editions of this title are available from your digital library instead.
Description-
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES AND TIME MAGAZINE "BEST BOOK OF 2017" "A breathtaking novel...[that] arrives at an urgent time." –NPR.org "It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future... At once terrifying and ... oddly hopeful." –Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review "Moving, audacious, and indelibly human." –Entertainment Weekly, "A" rating "A finalist for the Man Booker Prize and a New York Times bestseller, the astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands.
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . . Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.
From the cover
In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a f lowing black robe. Back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.
It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
Saeed noticed that Nadia had a beauty mark on her neck, a tawny oval that sometimes, rarely but not never, moved with her pulse.
Not long after noticing this, Saeed spoke to Nadia for the first time. Their city had yet to experience any major fighting, just some shootings and the odd car bombing, felt in one's chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by large loudspeakers at music concerts, and Saeed and Nadia had packed up their books and were leaving class.
In the stairwell he turned to her and said, "Listen, would you like to have a coffee," and after a brief pause added, to make it seem less forward, given her conservative attire, "in the cafeteria?"
Nadia looked him in the eye. "You don't say your evening prayers?" she asked.
Saeed conjured up his most endearing grin. "Not always. Sadly."
Her expression did not change.
So he persevered, clinging to his grin with the mounting desperation of a doomed rock climber: "I think it's personal. Each of us has his own way. Or . . . her own way. Nobody's perfect. And, in any case—"
She interrupted him. "I don't pray," she said. She continued to gaze at him steadily.
Then she said, "Maybe another time."
He watched as she walked out to the student parking area and there, instead of covering her head with a black cloth, as he expected, she donned a black motorcycle helmet that had been locked to a scuffed-up hundred-ish cc trail bike, snapped down her visor, straddled her ride, and rode off, disappearing with a controlled rumble into the gathering dusk.
The next day, at work, Saeed found himself unable to stop thinking of Nadia. Saeed's employer was an agency that specialized in the placement of outdoor advertising. They owned billboards all around the city, rented others, and struck deals for further space with the likes of bus lines, sports stadiums, and proprietors of tall buildings.
The agency occupied both floors of a converted townhouse and had over a dozen employees. Saeed was among the most junior, but his boss liked him and had tasked him with turning around a pitch to a local soap company that had to go out by email before five. Normally Saeed tried to do copious amounts of online research and customize his presentations as much as possible. "It's not a story if it doesn't have an audience," his boss was fond of saying, and for Saeed this meant trying to show a client that his firm truly understood their business, could really get under their skin and see things from their point of view.
But today, even though the pitch was important—every pitch...
About the Author-
Mohsin Hamid is the author of the international bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize. His first novel, Moth Smoke, won the Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. His essays, a number of them collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.
Reviews-
January 2, 2017 Hamid’s (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) trim yet poignant fourth novel addresses similar themes as his previous work and presents a unique perspective on the global refugee crisis. In an unidentified country, young Saeed and burqa-wearing Nadia flee their home after Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet and their city turns increasingly dangerous due to worsening violent clashes between the government and guerillas. The couple joins other migrants traveling to safer havens via carefully guarded doors. Through one door, they wind up in a crowded camp on the Greek Island of Mykonos. Through another, they secure a private room in an abandoned London mansion populated mostly by displaced Nigerians. A third door takes them to California’s Marin County. In each location, their relationship is by turns strengthened and tested by their struggle to find food, adequate shelter, and a sense of belonging among emigrant communities. Hamid’s storytelling is stripped down, and the book’s sweeping allegory is timely and resonant. Of particular importance is the contrast between the migrants’ tenuous daily reality and that of the privileged second- or third-generation native population who’d prefer their new alien neighbors to simply disappear. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME Entertainment.
In this contemporary love story, two people are thrown together against a backdrop of violence and circumstance in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. The author narrates in a deep pitch and warm tone. Saeed and Nadia confront their feelings for each other while fearing for their own safety as the city descends into chaos. Hamid delivers the themes of love, loss, and politics with a somber undertone that will remind readers that the details of his novel could be real life for many people around the world. The narrator's style is purposeful, measured, and dramatic. Each chapter leaves the listener waiting to hear what will happen next. M.R. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
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In this contemporary love story, two people are thrown together against a backdrop of violence and circumstance in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. The author narrates in a deep pitch and warm tone. Saeed and Nadia confront their feelings for each other while fearing for their own safety as the city descends into chaos. Hamid delivers the themes of love, loss, and politics with a somber undertone that will remind readers that the details of his novel could be real life for many people around the world. The narrator's style is purposeful, measured, and dramatic. Each chapter leaves the listener waiting to hear what will happen next. M.R. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
