Product Description

At a cafe table in Lahore, a Pakistani man converses with a stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting...Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives on New York and the intensity of his work. And his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entree into Manhattan society on the exalted footing his own family once held back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez's meteoric rise to personal and professional success: the fulfillment of the immigrant's dream. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #207 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Marta Simonetti-Whitford, Guardian Books of the Year
"If a book had to be praised for its merits in defining the anxieties of our post-9/11 society, then Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist would be the one to win"

Philip Pullman
"I read Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist with increasing admiration. It is beautifully written - what a joy it is to find such intelligent prose, such clarity of thought and exposition - and superbly constructed. The author has managed to tighten the screw of suspense almost without our being aware it is happening, and the result is a tale of enormous tension. I read a lot of thrillers - or rather I start reading a lot of thrillers, and put most of them down - but this is more exciting than any thriller I've read for a long time, as well as being a subtle and elegant analysis of the state of our world today. I was enormously impressed"

Jo Glanville, Observer Books of the Year
"An elegant, artful, haunting novella - a deceptively simple narrative that is in fact deeply ambiguous"

Customer Reviews

Excellent disturbing read
This book is beautifully written. The words are chosen with care and this is consistent with the fact that the narrator - although had a privileged anglophile upbringing - is not English mother-tongue. However there are some annoying - if not disturbing - profiles. The narrator (or the author?) although proclaims his annoyance by American people's superiority complex, seems sometimes affected by the same problem: a badly concealed superiority complex towards Western people's supposed grossness...Although annoying, this is a beautifully written book, and the pace is fast....I recommend it

Interesting and quick read
I really enjoyed this book. I got so quickly swept away by the narrative that the book flew by.

Changez is the narrator and he is having a conversation with you in a Pakistani cafe. He tells you all about the years he spent in America, as a student and then at one of the most prestigeous companies in NYC. And now here he sits, in a cafe in Lahore with a beard telling you, a complete stranger, about this whole other life while you wait to find out what happened to make him come home.

I have to admit though, that I am still confused by the ending. I put the book down and said "eh?". If anyone could enlighten me I would be grateful. Am I just being thick here?

Interesting if slightly thin novella
The narrator is a Pakistani meeting an American in a Pakistani restaurant. Through a dialogue in which we only hear the narrator's voice, we learn of his Ivy League education in America, his love for a fellow student, his employment with a leading management consultancy, and his increasing disillusionment with the US, catalysed by 9/11. As the novel comes to its ambiguous conclusion we increasingly understand the relationship between the narrator and his guest.

This is an intriguing novella, which portrays the feeling of place beautifully and is very skillful in building up tension through its extremely sparse prose. On the downside, I was left wanting more. Too much contemporary literature is turgid and obese, but this book is the opposite, I was left wanting more detail, more depth.

Recommended, but more next time please.