BOOKS: IN THEIR WORDS
FORWARD LOOKING: Hamid says novels like his “allow people to walk through a possible future."
FROM TOP: RICHARD BRAVERY/PENGUIN; LAURENT DENIMAL,
EXIT WEST, the fourth novel by British-Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, is a book about migration. But Hamid hopes his latest will resonate even with readers who’ve never left their native land. “We are all migrants,” he says, speaking on the phone from his home in Lahore (he has also lived in London, New York City and California). Those of us who don’t migrate geographically, he says, “migrate through time.” Take an old man who has lived his entire life in the same village: “His friends from childhood have gone, the school he went to has been bulldozed, so really he is living in a different country even though he hasn’t moved.” If we could just recognize this common bond, Hamid suggests, we might start to think more constructively about migrants.