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  • Published: 1 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141029542
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

The Reluctant Fundamentalist




Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007

At a café 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 fulfilment 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.

  • Published: 1 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780141029542
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was published in ten languages, won a Betty Trask Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays and journalism have appeared in Time, the New York Times and the Guardian, among others. His latest novel is The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) published by Penguin. Mohsin Hamid currently lives, works and writes in London.

http://www.mohsinhamid.com

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Praise for The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Gripping... remains taut until the final pages...an elegant and sharp indictment of the clouds of suspicion that now shroud our world

Observer

A quietly told, cleverly constructed fable of infatuation and disenchantment with America, set on the treacherous faultlines of current east/west relations, and finely tuned to the ironies of mutual - but especially American - prejudice and misrepresentation...increasingly tense...genuinely provocative...intelligent, highly engaging

Guardian

Elegant, provocative . . . beautifully measured prose . . . a delicate meditation on the nature of perception and prejudice

Daily Mail

Masterful . . . A multi-layered and thoroughly gripping book, which works as a poignant love story, a powerful dissection of how US imperialist machinations have turned so many people against the world's superpower - and as a thriller that subtly ratchets up the nerve-jangling tension towards an explosive ending

Metro

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an important book

Evening Standard

A fantastic piece of work, superbly considered and controlled, with a lovely stillness and wisdom at its heart

The Times

Beautifully written

Philip Pullman

A profoundly contemporary story about civil wars, unstable countries and refugees pouring to the cities of the West... beautifully written, with the ghost of Camus hovering at the edge of the frame

New Statesman