About
Editor’s Note
“Pertinent & urgent…”“Exit West” is an excellently written and beautifully observed piece of fiction. A perfect illustration of fiction’s ability to give distant real-world conflicts an empathy and an urgency that straightforward reporting often struggles to convey.Alex P.
Scribd Editor
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Summary
"It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful." -Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review
"A breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time." -NPR.org
"Moving, audacious, and indelibly human." -Entertainment Weekly, "A" rating
As featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, in the Skimm, on Fresh Air, and elsewhere, an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands.
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 remarkable 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, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.
"A breathtaking novel…[that] arrives at an urgent time." -NPR.org
"Moving, audacious, and indelibly human." -Entertainment Weekly, "A" rating
As featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, in the Skimm, on Fresh Air, and elsewhere, an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands.
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 remarkable 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, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.
Published: Penguin Random House Audio on Mar 7, 2017