A review by jess_mango
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

4.0

Not quite sci-fi, not quite a romance, not quite a book about living during wartime but a near perfect blend of those and more. Exit West is a relatively short novel (just over 200 pages) and is a pretty quick and easy read. The prose just flows without pretension or distractions. The main characters are Saeed and Nadia who live in an unnamed Muslim nation that is being overrun by militants. They start dating and as life gets more and more dangerous, Nadia and Saeed decide to go through one of the mysterious black doors/portals that show up in the city. These doors transport people to another part of the world. Those other parts of the world end up being flooded with refugees from various war-torn regions.

This book reminded me of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad in that it is magical realism about people escaping a bad circumstance by being transported to another location in some fantastical way. I thoroughly enjoyed both of these books.