Exit West

Exit West is Mohsin Hamid's 2017 fourth novel, the Booker Prize shortlist book of 2017 and Hamid's structural masterwork in the contemporary literary-fiction-on-migration tradition. The structural premise is Saeed and Nadia, a young couple in an unnamed Middle Eastern city descending into civil war (the city is left intentionally unnamed but reads as a composite of Lahore, Aleppo, Mosul, and the broader 2010s Middle-Eastern-and-South-Asian conflict-zone geography). After the city's military collapse, Saeed and Nadia escape through one of the mysterious black doors that have begun appearing around the world and that lead instantly to other cities. The novel runs their migration through Mykonos refugee camps, then through London (in which the broader contemporary anti-refugee European political-and-military reaction provides the structural setting for the middle third of the novel), then through Marin (the contemporary California refugee community provides the structural setting for the back third of the novel).

Hamid's structural method is the patient close-third-person omniscient Saeed-and-Nadia construction across the entire migration arc, with the broader magical-realist black-door device providing the structural conceit that the contemporary American and British literary fiction on migration has not historically committed to at this scale. The Saeed-and-Nadia relationship across the novel carries the structural emotional weight that the broader political-and-historical material requires; the embedded short-vignette chapters across the novel (small short paragraphs about other people across the world stepping through other doors) carry the structural global-and-allegorical counterpoint that distinguishes Hamid's project from the broader contemporary migration-fiction tradition. The novel's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of contemporary mass migration require a specific kind of literary-and-imaginative attention that the broader contemporary literary fiction has not historically committed to) is made through the texture of the door-and-arrival chapters rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary literary fiction reading, as the right Hamid entry point alongside The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and as one of the canonical 2010s American-and-British literary novels on migration. Compare to The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen), On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Ocean Vuong), Solito (Javier Zamora), and contemporary literary fiction on migration. The Mohsin Hamid audiobook (author-narrated) is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.