Exit West

Mohsin Hamid's 2017 novel follows Saeed and Nadia, two young people who meet as students in an unnamed city sliding toward civil war. Saeed is the more conservative and still lives at home, while Nadia lives on her own, and her parents have disowned her for that choice. Their love affair deepens as militants fight for control and checkpoints and bomb blasts take over familiar streets. Rumours spread of doors that can carry people to distant places, at a risk and a price. Hamid, a British-Pakistani author, uses the device to write about migration and refugees. The novel won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Sarah Jessica Parker praised it as a real, beautiful and electrifying portrait of what being an immigrant means today, a story of two people driven from home and looking for another one.