Exit West

a novel

229 pages

Langue : English

Publié 11 septembre 2017 par Hamish Hamilton, Riverhead Books.

ISBN :
978-0-7352-1217-6
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Numéro OCLC :
951925351

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1 étoile (1 critique)

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 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, …

3 editions

Review of 'Exit West' on 'Goodreads'

1 étoile

I really, really wanted to like this book. I had felt like I found a book to capture something important about the state of the world. But "Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid is profoundly disappointing. Oddly written, poorly paced, and strangely distant, it takes what could have been a strong and interesting premise and buries it under an ersatz combination of cleverness, fable, and metaphor.

The story follows Nadia and Saeed, two young people who fall in love in an unnamed Middle Eastern city descending into civil war. They flee their city and head to the West where they live under siege like conditions in London and gradually grow apart in the United States and go along their own paths.

I feel that the first part in the unnamed city worked okay. It is when they left the city that the novel start falling off the rails. I believe the …

Sujets

  • Fiction
  • Magical Realism
  • Civil War
  • Refugees
  • Immigration
  • Romance
  • Mykonos
  • Greece
  • London
  • England
  • Marin
  • California
  • Magic