Exit West

Separation. Almost every human longs for a better world, and wants to live a settled life in a community where we can love and be loved. Protagonists Nadia and Saeed are those people, just like us, in Mohsin Hamid’s novel titled, Exit West. They fell in love in a distant city, and when violence reaches their doorstep, they flee, and are separated from their community and loved ones. To ease their passage and to manage the separation, Hamid uses the device of magic doors. Would that these doors exist, given the plight of people like Nadia and Saeed in many parts of the world today. Hamid takes the headlines, and brings them close to everyone’s home in this finely written novel. He captured our situation, in my view, in this excerpt: p. 158 “The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart.” All this separation needs to be healed. We need to mend all these fractures. Hamid does some mending with his finely written prose in this novel. Rating: Four-star (I like it) Click here to purchase Exit West from amazon.com.