Exit West
Chosen by Farhana
Boy meets girl, boy asks girl out, they fall in love... In an unnamed city, where magical doorways start to appear, which are portals to other lands, where life may be better, or worse. In the world of Exit West, nothing is at it seems.
Penned by British Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid (author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist), 2017’s Booker Prize-shortlisted Exit West follows the story of Saeed and Nadia as they fall in love in a city that’s falling apart, before packing their bags and trying their luck through one mysterious doorway and then another, as they make new lives in Mykonos, London, San Francisco and beyond.
Exit West is part love story, part social realism, part magic realism, part fable, part speculative fiction. In fact, it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is. However it is this mutability, along with its take on migration and love-against-the-odds that makes this novel so unique. Take the opening paragraph, for example:
‘In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stub‑ ble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe. Back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.’ (Source: BBC R4 website, where you can read the whole of Chapter 1 in full, here.
Refugees, peace and war, the difficulties of communication, and the significance of boundaries and choices. Saeed and Nadia’s existence bears many parallels to our own. And the author’s choice of themes such as the global migrant crisis, and race- and class-based violence and riots, shows that this is a book with its finger on the unsteady pulse of a complicated modern world. This is also apparent in the language and structure of the novel, which contains many sentences like the above where people and things are often described through negation, as well as passages where the main narrative pauses and ‘cuts away’ to other characters and places that we do not see again, before continuing with Saeed and Nadia’s journey.
This is a novel that juggles a lot of big issues and the narrative style will not be to everyone’s taste. However, it’s also a book that’s full of humour and hope. So, if you’re looking for something that’s a little different (and apparently the inspiration for a forthcoming Netflix film produced by the Russo brothers, starring Riz Ahmed, with Barak and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions on board too), then you might want to check out Exit West.