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A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Gems

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

‘Astonishing’ Zadie Smith
‘Stunning’ Spectator
‘Extraordinary’ TLS

An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

All over the world, doors are appearing.
They lead to other cities, other countries, other lives.

And in a city gripped by war, Nadia and Saeed are newly in love.
Hardly more than strangers, desperate to survive, they open a door and step through.

But the doors only go one way.
Once you leave, there is no going back.

*Coming soon as a major Netflix film – produced by Michelle and Barack Obama and starring Riz Ahmed*

‘One of the year’s most significant literary works’ The New York Times
‘A masterpiece’ Michael Chabon
‘Addictively readable and brilliantly written. Fantastic’ Mail on Sunday

Publisher Review

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 * Publisher's description. In an unnamed city swollen by refugees, two young people fall in love. One day soon they will have to leave their homeland, running for their lives, searching for their place in the world. * Penguin * Powerful, vivid, poignant... Hamid is the master * Sunday Times * 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 * A love story as spare, haunting and spiritually powerful as a haiku. All my life I will remember Nadia and Saeed, their humanity against a surreal, broken landscape. Exit West is Hamid's finest book -- Kiran Desai Imaginative, inventive, graceful... Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and imagine a better world * New York Times Book Review * A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic * GQ * 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 * Astonishing -- Zadie Smith Immediately canonical * New Yorker * Part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable, Exit West is a thought experiment that pivots on the crucial figure of this century: the migrant * Financial Times * Exit West packs such an emotional wallop you will be thinking about it for days afterwards. For Hamid is not only telling a story, he is asking what sort of a world we want to live in. * Editor's Choice, the Bookseller * It's a terrific, beautifully constructed, important novel of our time. This is what we expect fiction to do: to examine our age but also to cast an eye on the past and - very brilliantly in this case - on the future too. I love it. * Mirza Waheed * Exit West is a masterpiece. It stretches the boundaries of the real just enough to make a point about the state of immigrants and refugees in the contemporary world. But it's very much grounded in reality. It's a beautiful book. * Michael Chabon * Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious writers of his generation * Telegraph * A man born to write -- Dave Eggers The voice of a changing continent. A writer at the top of his game * Metro *