Why a Booktrail?
2000s: “We are all migrants through time.”
Exit West
What you need to know before your trail
Nadia and Saeed are two ordinary young people, attempting to do an extraordinary thing – to fall in love – in a world turned upside down. Theirs will be a love story but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow, of a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.
Civil war has come to the city which Nadia and Saeed call home. Before long they will need to leave their motherland behind – when the streets are no longer useable and the unknown is safer than the known. They will join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world . . .
Travel Guide
The world as seen through the eyes of a refugee
From The Middle East, Greece, London, America
“In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.”
The book starts in a country in the middle of political turmoil. Clearly located in the Middle East, it is a country of no name, but then that’s the whole point of this novel – it could and is anywhere where refugees leave and where turmoil exists.
It’s any country that forces its people to try to seek out a better life elsewhere, forcing them to flee and leave everything they’ve ever known.
“We are all migrants through time.”
“When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
The journey which follows is a long and arduous one. After a spell in England they arrive in California having travelled through several places trying to find a place they can call home. With each location they seem to lose a little piece of themselves. They are often not welcome and try to find a small place of anywhere they can call home.
There is not much sense of the actual journeys however since the refugees pass through doors to get to their new land – doors that randomly transform into passages to another place. So there is no turmoil in getting across the borders, no risk of perishing at sea….a vital part of the refugee journey in many ways.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Exit West
Destination: worldwide Author/Guide: Mohsin Hamid Departure Time: 2000s
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