The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Description

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007

At a café table in Lahore, a Pakistani man converses with a stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting…

Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives on New York and the intensity of his work. And his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entree into Manhattan society on the exalted footing his own family once held back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success: the fulfilment of the immigrant’s dream. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

Reviews

“Gripping… remains taut until the final pages…an elegant and sharp indictment of the clouds of suspicion that now shroud our world” ― Observer

“A quietly told, cleverly constructed fable of infatuation and disenchantment with America, set on the treacherous faultlines of current east/west relations, and finely tuned to the ironies of mutual – but especially American – prejudice and misrepresentation…increasingly tense…genuinely provocative…intelligent, highly engaging” ― Guardian

“Elegant, provocative . . . beautifully measured prose . . . a delicate meditation on the nature of perception and prejudice” ― Daily Mail

“Masterful . . . A multi-layered and thoroughly gripping book, which works as a poignant love story, a powerful dissection of how US imperialist machinations have turned so many people against the world’s superpower – and as a thriller that subtly ratchets up the nerve-jangling tension towards an explosive ending” ― Metro

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an important book” ― Evening Standard

“A fantastic piece of work, superbly considered and controlled, with a lovely stillness and wisdom at its hear” ― The Times

“Beautifully written” ―Philip Pullman

“A profoundly contemporary story about civil wars, unstable countries and refugees pouring to the cities of the West… beautifully written, with the ghost of Camus hovering at the edge of the frame” ― New Statesman

Author Biography

Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Discontent and its Civilisations. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York. His next novel, Exit West, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in spring 2017.