Title: Exit West
Author: Mohsin Hamid
Genre: Fiction
Read by: author
Publisher/Date: Thorndike
Press/2017
Dates listened to: 11/27/17 – 12/2/17
Downloadable Audio Book:
4 hours, 42 minutes
I really liked this book.
It begins in an area of the world where strife plagues the city-dwellers. We aren’t sure just where this city is but
you feel the undercurrent of insurrection and bombing and raids, knowing a
civil war is at hand. People begin
looking for ways to escape. People like
Saeed and Nadia. These youngsters are
college age, yet are trying to stay chaste, at least Saeed is, wanting to stay
true to his faith. Though they are in
love they aren’t ready to marry with such unrest going on in their city. And Saeed has just lost his mother and his
father is not well.
Then doors begin to open and people begin to exit to safer
places in the world. It’s a bit of a
fantasy just how this is happening yet totally believable. For Saeed and Nadia they get an option to
leave. An operative has brought them to
a door and it’s up to them who goes first.
Nadia has promised Saeed’s father she will look after his son and goes
first. She finds herself in a tiled,
dark bathroom. Saeed follows her and
they exit into a place with a beach in a dry, hot climate.
This is not the end of their journey. Their travels take them to other safer
places throughout the world, until they end up in Marin County, California. We find them falling out of love and
expanding their territories, meeting new people, trying new things at the same time
trying yet failing to hold on to one another. Time
interferes and a lifetime goes by before they are reunited.
It is a relatively short book and is so reflective of our
present time, with so much unrest in the world, you can just see how desperate
people get to escape their current situation and Hamid provides a plausible way
for that to happen.
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