Exit West

“Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done.” –p.166

Essential points: In war-ravaged and famine-starved and poverty-strangled nations around the world, portals begin to open suddenly, mysteriously, alluringly, to other places—to Western nations that have for the breadth of history hoarded their wealth and power. In this enchantingly-written fable for the future, the young lovers Nadia and Saeed flee their unspecified country through one of these doors and bravely migrate onward and onward, their journey taking them far from home and, eventually, each other. While unflinching in its representation of the horrors of war, Hamid’s work is ultimately dreamy in all senses of the word, as its ethereal language crafts a vision of what our collective future could look like were we able to understand that the borders between us are only state-enforced imaginary lines, that “[w]e are all migrants through time” (209). Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): racism, xenophobia, sexual assault, war, bombing, murder.