A portrait of contemporary Pakistan featuring an adulterous romance between two ultra-rich jet setters. He is a banker and she is the wife of his best friend, and she is escaping the constraints of marriage and motherhood by prowling the city as a journalist.
Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London
Originally published in hardccover in 2015 by Riverhead Books.
From impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, our nameless hero amasses an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else: the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet--sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors--doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As violence and the threat of violence escalate, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter… Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love. "Extreme times call for extreme reactions, extreme writing. Hamid has done something extraordinary with this novel." —Washington Post "One of those achingly assured novels that makes you happy to be a reader." —Junot Diaz "Brief, charming, and quietly furious . . . a resounding success." —Village Voice A Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year A New York Times Notable Book
From the twice Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West , a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling changeOne morning, Anders wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover.Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land. Some see in the transformations the long-dreaded overturning of an established order, to be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss wars with profound love.As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different a chance to see one another, face to face, anew.'A transformative tale . . . compellingly readable and strangely musical' Guardian'With this big-hearted novel of ideas, Mohsin Hamid confronts challenging truths with insight, wisdom, and - above all else - limitless compassion' Tayari Jones, An American Marriage