As with the very best literature, its crystalline readability fast eclipses its topicality (Mail on Sunday)[A] devastating portrait of victims of war, creating a singular parable about modernity, migration and the individual's place in the world (The Guardian)A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. A novel that fuses the real with the surreal - perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet (The New York Times)No conventional love story. [An] exceptionally moving and powerful novel (The Guardian)Publisher's description. In an unnamed city swollen by refugees, two young people fall in love. One day soon they will have to leave their homeland, running for their lives, searching for their place in the world. (Penguin)Powerful, vivid, poignant... Hamid is the master (Sunday Times)

Writing in spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy

(Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)A love story as spare, haunting and spiritually powerful as a haiku. All my life I will remember Nadia and Saeed, their humanity against a surreal, broken landscape. Exit West is Hamid's finest book (Kiran Desai)Imaginative, inventive, graceful... Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and imagine a better world (New York Times Book Review)A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic (GQ)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 *A Barack Obama top ten book of 2017*

WINNER of the LA Times Prize for Fiction * WINNER of the Aspen Words Literary Prize

Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

'Astonishing' Zadie Smith * 'Stunning' Spectator * 'Extraordinary' TLS

An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

All over the world, doors are appearing.They lead to other cities, other countries, other lives.

And in a city gripped by war, Nadia and Saeed are newly in love.Hardly more than strangers, desperate to survive, they open a door and step through.

But the doors only go one way. Once you leave, there is no going back.

'One of the year's most significant literary works' The New York Times

'A masterpiece' Michael Chabon

'Addictively readable and brilliantly written. Fantastic' Mail on Sunday

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards for Best Novel

Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2018 and finalist for the Neustadt Prize 2018