Exit West cover art

Exit West

A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems

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About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Exit West written and read by Mohsin Hamid.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017.

This is Nadia. She is fiercely independent with an excellent sense of humour and a love of smoking alone on her balcony late at night.

This is Saeed. He is sweet and shy and kind to strangers. He also has a balcony but he uses his for star-gazing.

This is their story: a love story, but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow. Saeed and Nadia are falling in love, and their city is falling apart. Here is a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.

Exit West is a heartfelt and radical act of hope - a novel to restore your faith in humanity and in the power of imagination.

'Mixing the real and the surreal, using old fairy-tale magic... Compelling, crystalline, unnervingly dystopian' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

 Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Islamic Heritage Literary Fiction Metaphysical & Visionary Political Psychological Science Fiction Fantasy Heartfelt Magic

Critic reviews

As with the very best literature, its crystalline readability fast eclipses its topicality
[A] devastating portrait of victims of war, creating a singular parable about modernity, migration and the individual's place in the world
A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. A novel that fuses the real with the surreal - perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet
No conventional love story. [An] exceptionally moving and powerful novel
Publisher's description. In an unnamed city swollen by refugees, two young people fall in love. One day soon they will have to leave their homeland, running for their lives, searching for their place in the world.
Powerful, vivid, poignant... Hamid is the master

Writing in spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy
A love story as spare, haunting and spiritually powerful as a haiku. All my life I will remember Nadia and Saeed, their humanity against a surreal, broken landscape. Exit West is Hamid's finest book (Kiran Desai)
Imaginative, inventive, graceful... Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and imagine a better world
A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic
All stars
Most relevant
How will refugees fare in the disruption of the coming decades? This personal story of two refugees fleeing war in an unnamed country for a better life in the West illustrates the economic, social and political pressures they and the populations they join might face as well as the universal struggles associated with being a human being living ones life.

An important & prophetic book for this decade?

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Good start with mixture of vivid description and high concept fantasy but did not maintain narrative tension

Interesting start but tailed off

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This is an amazing book, with beautiful language and highly original images and ideas.

Beautiful book and amazing to hear the author

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Such a great book to read. Best book in a long time. Such a great read.

Brilliantly written

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The beginning piqued interest for sure
The trauma bonding and the migration to/from different lives —amazing execution in the story

But as it reached its climax it fell very quickly and dramatically
Almost like at the tail end of the book the author decided he no longer wanted to put in the same effort

The pacing changed, in-depth focus on characters we did not know that didn’t add to plot line increased

It feels like wasted potentials

A bit of an underwhelming finish

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