Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world. It is also a possible world. Exit West does not lead to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. All we have to do is step through it and meet them. -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, The New York Times Book Review (cover)

In spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy. He shows just how swiftly ordinary life - with all its banal rituals and routines - can morph into the defensive crouch of life in a war zone. ... [and] how insidiously violence alters the calculus of daily life. ... By mixing the real and the surreal, and using old fairy-tale magic, Hamid has created a fictional universe that captures the global perils percolating beneath today's headlines. -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Lyrical and urgent, the globalist novel evokes the dreams and disillusionments that follow Saeed and Nadia....and peels away the dross of bigotry to expose the beauty of our common humanity. -O, the Oprah Magazine

A beautiful and very detailed look at what it means to be an immigrant...An incredible book. -Sarah Jessica Parker on Read it Forward

A little like the eerily significant Margaret Atwood novel, this love story amid the rubble of violence, uncertainty, and modernity feels at once otherworldly and all too real. - New York Magazine's The Strategist

This is the best writing of Hamid's career... Readers will find themselves going back and savoring each paragraph several times before moving on. He's that good. ... Breathtaking. -NPR.org

Nearly every page reflects the tangible impact of life during wartime-not just the blood and gunsmoke of daily bombardments, but the quieter collateral damage that seeps in. The true magic of [ Exit West ] is how it manages to render it all in a narrative so moving, audacious, and indelibly human. -Entertainment Weekly, A rating

Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants. ... But, still, he depicts the world as resolutely beautiful and, at its core, unchanged. The novel feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid's understanding of our time and its most pressing questions. - NewYorker.com

No novel is really about the cliche called 'the human condition,' but good novels expose and interpret the particular condition of the humans in their charge, and this is what Hamid has achieved here. If in its physical and perilous immediacy Nadia and Saeed's condition is alien to the mass of us, Exit West makes a final, certain declaration of affinity: 'We are all migrants through time.' -Washington Post

Brilliant...Its intelligently deployed surreal elements are also the best examples I've seen lately of how the nonrealistic is sometimes the best way to depict how an experience feels, as opposed to just the facts of what it is. -Vulture

Skillful and panoramic from the outset... [A] meticulously crafted, ambitious story of many layers, many geopolitical realities, many lives and circumstances...Here is the world, he seems to be saying, the direction we're hurtling in. How are we going to mitigate the damage we've done? - The New York Review of Books

Like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but set in the real world. You'll be hearing about it, so get into it now. -TheSkimm

Spellbinding. - Buzzfeed

A short, urgent missive in which each detail gleams with authorial intent....Exit West is lit with hope. Hamid has said that part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures, and that fiction can imagine differently. Exit West does so, and beautifully. May Hamid's hopes turn out to be as prescient as his concerns already are. -San Francisco Chronicle

[An] ambitious a