Discussed in this essay:
Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead Books. 240 pages. $26.
Early in Mohsin Hamid’s remarkable new novel, Exit West, a young couple fall in love in an unnamed city where war is about to break out. The streets and parks are crowded with stunned and dying refugees, but so far the unrest has been limited to “some shootings and the odd car bombing, felt in one’s chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by large loudspeakers at music concerts.” Despite the distant crackle of gunfire, Saeed and Nadia, who meet in an evening…
