As long as there are parts of the world that experience war, famine, and oppression, there will be immigrants and refugees. Mohsin Hamid's short, delicate Exit West tells a story about two of them, Saeed and Nadia, with a small magical realism twist: people move between countries through doors that appear, seemingly at random. People go through them, but they don't come back, so you don't know exactly where you're going until you get there. You just know that it's not where you are, and for many people, that's enough. Including our central couple, young people in a never-named, seemingly majority-Muslim city. Nadia covers herself from collarbone to toe in a long robe although such attire is not mandatory...but she's an atheist who smokes pot and is sexually active. Saeed is more traditional, but still far from devout. They meet in a class and sparks start to fly...but then so do bullets as insurgents begin to battle the government in their city, too.

Soon, they're left with little choice but to flee if they want any hope for the future. As they enter first Mykonos, and then London, thousands of others are doing the same. Hamid tosses little side vignettes of other refugees into his story, showing how people react to the new reality: some respond with fear and violence, but others build unexpected connections. As more and more people come streaming across borders, tension between the native populations of the countries experiencing an inflow and the desperate masses who've arrived begin to build. But cracks begin to form between Saeed and Nadia, as they find themselves taking different approaches to life in their new reality.

There's something fairy-tale-esque about this story, and it's not just because of Hamid's absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous writing. Maybe it's in how Saeed and Nadia are given personalities, but still feel symbolic. Maybe it's the way Hamid "zooms out", as it were, every so often to give us a fuller view outside of their story. Maybe it's the familiar beats of love, and loss, and a journey. Maybe it's the undeniable sense of optimism. Maybe it's the elegance of the narrative. It's probably a little bit of all of the above.

I'll admit that I was wary when I heard that this book has a magical realism element, as that doesn't usually appeal to me. But I found myself grabbed by Saeed and Nadia, and their growing bond, and their reluctant flight from home, and their struggles to make new lives for themselves. And the device of the doors makes for a certain efficiency that works with the overall flow of the novel...like I said above, there's a real elegance to it, every word and plot detail seems like the product of a deliberate choice to include it. So using doors allows us to skip all the tedium of the mechanical aspects of getting from point A to point B. I was both charmed and deeply moved by this book and now I need to read everything else Hamid's ever written because this was amazing. I'd recommend this book to everyone. ( )

You may say Hamid is a dreamer. He imagines a world in which human migration becomes an unstoppable physical act, so that immigration policies and border controls are moot. Millions of refugees and migrants from poor countries step through doors and emerge in rich Western countries. The West initially tries to counter this human movement through force, people believe in scarcity and seek to protect what they have, religious teaching often being a weak force in conflict with human instinct, but fairly soon the West accepts new arrivals as nothing else can really be done, and "reports of [conflict] seemed less than apocalyptic... existence went on in tolerable safety."

But the macro view is not Hamid's focus. He does not write about policymakers, or political leaders, or national figures. He writes about individuals and how the experience of migration affects them; mostly through the characters of Saeed and Nadia (from an unnamed Mosul), but also through vignettes of other people from other places. Of one family, he writes, "That they were ashamed, and that they did not yet know that shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling, and that there was, therefore, no particular shame in being ashamed."

The novel is more dreamy than detail oriented, more magical realist that realist, touchingly written, and its lovely humanist approach to the issue of refugees and migration is certainly timely and welcome. When Hamid writes, "the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage, and in such a world the religion of the righteous must defend those who sought passage," it's a clear political and religious rallying cry for the sort of world we should aspire to. ( )

Unnamed country amidst a civil war. Two young lovers caught within the levers of a real and unreal destiny. ( )

The novel begins in an unnamed city in an unnamed country, which I immediately assumed was somewhere in Southwest Asia. The city is “swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” A young man and woman meet in a night-school business class, become friends, start hanging out as conditions in their city deteriorate while government forces clash with outside religious radicals and neighborhoods are destroyed one by one. The couple begins looking for rumored “doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this deathtrap of a country.” They go through several of these doors during the novel, traveling from Mykonos to London to Marin, California. I found the writing in this novel at times lyrical, but at times I had trouble following the story, wondering about people that were dropped in here and there and then disappeared from the narrative. Nevertheless, it is timely story (written in 2017) about the plight of political refugees, about war and love and humanity and nativism and community, about coupling and uncoupling. The vehicle for migration – doors people might step through on their somewhere else – hints of magic realism in which to wrap and blunt the sharp edges of difficult journeys toward the promise and hope of a better life, in the tradition of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer. ( )

Lyrically beautiful. He has such a particular writing some. Full review to come! ( )