Re: Exit West: A Novel Free Download
Roseanne Devon
Exit West is a 2017 novel by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. It is Hamid's fourth novel. The main themes of the novel are emigration and refugee problems.[1] The novel, which can be considered fantasy or speculative fiction,[2] is about a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, who live in an unnamed city undergoing civil war and finally have to flee, using a system of magical doors that lead to different locations around the globe.[3]
Exit West was a New York Times best seller,[22] and many outlets included the book in "best of" lists. Kirkus Reviews,[22] Shelf Awareness,[23] TIME,[24] and Tor.com named it one of the top ten novels of 2017, whereas Entertainment Weekly,[20] The Harvard Crimson,[19] Literary Hub,[25] and Paste[18] included it in their lists of the best books of the decade.
Exit West attracted much attention from scholars and readers because the novel deals so closely with current events and problematic social norms.[41] Scholars argue that Hamid is questioning the trending opinions of border security with Brexit and Trump, emphasizes the fake sense of connection to refugees through technology, and stresses the importance of preserving the global environment.
Similar to some of Hamid's previous novels, Exit West also hints at the importance of changing global habits and creating a cleaner environment around the world.[8] Hamid does this by emphasizing natural beauties throughout the novel and showing readers how when people have a choice and appreciation for where they live, they treat the environment with more respect.
In August 2017, it was announced that the Russo brothers had purchased the rights to adapt the novel and will serve as producers, while Morten Tyldum hired as director.[42] In March 2020, Michelle and Barack Obama came on board as producers, with Riz Ahmed playing Saeed and Yann Demange set to direct. The film was also set to be produced by Higher Ground Productions and distributed by Netflix.[43] Joe Russo stated in an April interview that production on the film could begin soon at the time, but that depended on the COVID-19 pandemic and how film productions could commence during that time.[44] In an August 2022 interview, the novel's author Mohsin Hamid stated the film was still in the development stage.[45]
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
But what if there were? That's the question Mohsin Hamid poses in his haunting new book, Exit West. The fourth novel from the Pakistani-born author is at once a love story, a fable, and a chilling reflection on what it means to be displaced, unable to return home and unwelcome anywhere else.
HAMID: I think we're all both. The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable. Almost everything has changed. So even people who stay in the same place undergo a kind of migration through time. And in the novel, what I'm trying to explore is how everyone is a migrant.
INSKEEP: That's some of our conversation with Mohsin Hamid, a novelist from Pakistan. He lives in a country where the United States has spent a lot of time and money to spread its ideas of democracy and good government. And as we talked, Hamid offered to spread some wisdom back the other way.
Their escape is addressed in a single, short paragraph. One moment, they step through the door, and a mere eight lines later, they emerge. That dangerous, arduous journey during which so many meet their end (at least 10,000 are projected to have died in 2016) is not significant to this novel.
The rumor proves true. Nothing else in the novel is particularly magical: Hamid instead imagines a world in which one tiny little thing has changed. Saeed and Nadia pay a smuggler to bring them to a door. They do not know where they will arrive upon passing through.
More profound, however, is that the writing style also conveyed the immense and incalculable implications of a single action, particularly in a time as tenuous and tumultuous as war time and surviving it. Indeed, Exit West begins its story as the reality and presence of war begins to seep into the daily lives of both the protagonists, Saeed and Nadia. As war and the consequences of war become more pertinent to the characters, the writing becomes more frantic, almost reflecting the growing complexity and uncertainty in their daily lives.
Early in his remarkable How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Mohsin Hamid advanced an idea familiar to readers of nineteenth-century fiction: Novels should teach readers how to dress, address a member of the opposite sex, and elevate one's standing in society. In other words, the novel could function not only as entertainment but also as self-help. Things haven't changed too much. We still read to improve ourselves. But there's one significant difference: Where the imagined reader of earlier times might have read books in order to learn how to behave in a civilized way, we now read to gain understanding of, if not intimacy with, civilization itself. Here is Hamid in Filthy Rich:
Why, for example, do you persist in reading that much-praised, breathtakingly boring foreign novel, slogging through page after page after please-make-it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blush-inducing formal conceit, if not out of an impulse to understand distant lands that because of globalization are increasingly affecting life in your own?
The above words came back to me while reading Hamid's latest work, Exit West. The description of the "foreign novel" applies to it in one particular sense. Mohsin Hamid, born in Lahore, Pakistan, but very much a citizen of the world, or at least a person with the experience of long habitation in the West, has been a reliable narrator of global change and conflict. Like his compatriot Mohammed Hanif, another Pakistani writer equally adept at writing op-eds and inventive fiction, Hamid brings lucidity and drama to his reports about life on the subcontinent. I'm tempted to say he is the go-to man on globalization, except that he is not interested in selling the view that the world is flat. Rather, he seeks to represent the voice of the other. Compare, for example, Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) with Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). Both are about 9/11, but where DeLillo explores the aftermath through the eyes of an adulterous couple and the alienation of a performer, Hamid allows us to see the same events through the eyes of an outsider. Hamid's protagonist, Changez, a young man from Lahore, educated at Princeton and employed by an elite financial firm in New York when the attacks take place, has an eloquent, anguished sense of what it means to be on either side of the global divide. The Reluctant Fundamentalist also conforms to the above quote's statement that the "foreign novel" satisfies an "impulse to understand distant lands," at least in the sense that it dramatically collapses the distance dividing places on opposite sides of the planet.
Editors Select, March 2017 - Set in a world being irrevocably transformed by migration, Exit West follows Saeed and Nadia, a young middle-class couple in an unnamed country. As their city collapses around them, they are forced to join a wave of migrants fleeing for their lives. But their journey is not what you'd expect. To escape, they decide to seek out one of the doors they've been hearing about, portals to another, safer part of the planet. Using these doorways to exit conflict zones, people emerge in Western societies. While magical and almost fairy-tale like, this novel is sharply modern - where social media is a prime source of information and drones fill the sky. There is also no fluff in the language - the story is told by a detached observer, which is perfectly captured in author/narrator Mohsin Hamid's beautifully measured performance. Spare yet rich, fanciful yet scarily realistic, Exit West brings home the very personal and human struggles people face as refugees. Tricia, Audible Editor
The New York Times best-selling novel: an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands, from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the forthcoming The Last White Man.
"From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a love story that unfolds in a world being irrevocably transformed by migration. 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, thrust into 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 violence and the threat of violence escalate, 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 is an epic compressed into a slender page-turner--both completely of our time and for all time, Mohsin Hamid's most ambitious and electrifying novel yet"--
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