MashReads Podcast: 'Exit West' is a stirring novel about the migrant crisis, with a fairytale twist

Author Mohsin Hamid has an observation about how people migrate today: "Human existence is an existence of transience. We don't stick around, sadly, and we change from moment to moment."

It is this observation that inspired Mohsin's latest novel Exit West, a stirring fable about the world's migrant crisis.

The novel follows two lovers, Nadia and Saeed, who live in a fictional city that succumbs to a militant civil war. Though restrictions are soon placed on their city, Nadia and Saeed are not stuck in their immediate location — mysterious doors begin to open, allowing Nadia and Saeed to migrate from place to place instantly.

Or to put it concisely, Hamid has a six-word pitch for you: "Young couple. Doors open. Everybody moves."

Though the book is filled with fairytale elements, it is grounded in a real experience: Mohsin's own migrant past.

"I've been a migrant my whole life," Mohsin explains. The author has been living in various places across the globe since he was a child. When he was three, his family moved to California from Pakistan, then back to Pakistan at age 9, back to California at age 18, to London at 30, and then back to Pakistan in his late 30s.

"But I was feeling increasingly this resentment of or fear of migrants that was cropping up in America and particularly Britain where I lived before. And when I went back to Pakistan, so many people told me they wanted to leave, they wanted to get out of Pakistan. They said 'Why did you come back?' The tension between those two things — my knowledge of the resistance against migrants that was growing and also the desire for migration that was also so strong — gave birth to this book."

This week on the MashReads Podcast, we talk with Hamid about his new novel. Join us as we chat about migration, writing and Exit West.

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Interview conducted by Peter Allen Clark.