Mohsin Hamid Popular Books
Mohsin Hamid Biography & Facts
Mohsin Hamid (Urdu: محسن حامد; born 23 July 1971) is a British Pakistani novelist, writer and brand consultant. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Exit West (2017), and The Last White Man (2022). Early life and education Born to a family of Punjabi and Kashmiri descent, Hamid spent part of his childhood in the United States, where he stayed from the age of 3 to 9 while his father, a university professor, was enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford University. He then moved with his family back to Lahore, Pakistan, and attended the Lahore American School.At the age of 18, Hamid returned to the United States to continue his education. He graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1993 after completing a 127-page-long senior thesis, titled "Sustainable Power: Integrated Resource Planning in Pakistan", under the supervision of Robert H. Williams. While he was a student at Princeton, Hamid studied under Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Hamid wrote the first draft of his first novel for a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. He returned to Pakistan after college to continue working on it.Hamid then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1997. Finding corporate law boring, he repaid his student loans by working for several years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York City. He was allowed to take three months off each year to write, and he used this time to complete his first novel Moth Smoke. Work Hamid moved to London in the summer of 2001, initially intending to stay only one year. Although he frequently returned to Pakistan to write, he continued to live in London for eight years, becoming a dual citizen of the United Kingdom in 2006. In 2004 he joined the brand consultancy Wolff Olins, working only three days a week so as to retain time to write. He later served as managing director of Wolff Olins' London office, and in 2015 was appointed the firm's first-ever Chief Storytelling Officer.Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, tells the story of a marijuana-smoking ex-banker in post-nuclear-test Lahore who falls in love with his best friend's wife and becomes a heroin addict. It was published in 2000, and quickly became a cult hit in Pakistan and India. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award given to the best first novel in the US. It was adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy. Moth Smoke had an innovative structure, using multiple voices, second-person trial scenes, and essays on such topics as the role of air-conditioning in the lives of its main characters. Pioneering a hip, contemporary approach to English language South Asian fiction, it was considered by some critics to be "the most interesting novel that came out of [its] generation of subcontinent (English) writing." In the New York Review of Books, Anita Desai noted:One could not really continue to write, or read about, the slow seasonal changes, the rural backwaters, gossipy courtyards, and traditional families in a world taken over by gun-running, drug-trafficking, large-scale industrialism, commercial entrepreneurship, tourism, new money, nightclubs, boutiques... Where was the Huxley, the Orwell, the Scott Fitzgerald, or even the Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, or Brett Easton Ellis to record this new world? Mohsin Hamid's novel Moth Smoke, set in Lahore, is one of the first pictures we have of that world. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, told the story of a Pakistani man who decides to leave his high-flying life in America after a failed love affair and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It was published in 2007 and became a million-copy international best seller, reaching No.4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award, and was translated into over 25 languages. The Guardian selected it as one of the books that defined the decade. Like Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was formally experimental. The novel uses the unusual device of a dramatic monologue in which the Pakistani protagonist continually addresses an American listener who is never heard from directly. (Hamid has said The Fall by Albert Camus served as his model.) According to one commentator, because of this technique:maybe we the readers are the ones who jump to conclusions; maybe the book is intended as a Rorschach to reflect back our unconscious assumptions. In our not knowing lies the novel's suspense... Hamid literally leaves us at the end in a kind of alley, the story suddenly suspended; it's even possible that some act of violence might occur. But more likely, we are left holding the bag of conflicting worldviews. We're left to ponder the symbolism of Changez having been caught up in the game of symbolism—a game we ourselves have been known to play. In an interview in May 2007, Hamid said of the brevity of The Reluctant Fundamentalist: "I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through."His third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, was excerpted by The New Yorker in their 24 September 2012 issue and by Granta in their Spring 2013 issue, and was released in March 2013 by Riverhead Books. As with his previous books, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia bends conventions of both genre and form. Narrated in the second person, it tells the story of the protagonist's ("your") journey from impoverished rural boy to tycoon in an unnamed contemporary city in "rising Asia," and of his pursuit of the nameless "pretty girl" whose path continually crosses but never quite converges with his. Stealing its shape from the self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over "rising Asia," the novel is playful but also quite profound in its portrayal of the thirst for ambition and love in a time of shattering economic and social upheaval. In her New York Times review of the novel, Michiko Kakutani called it "deeply moving," writing that How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia "reaffirms [Hamid's] place as one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers."Hamid has also written on politics, art, literature, travel, and other topics, most recently on Pakistan's internal division and extremism in an op-ed for the New York Times. His journalism, essays, and stories have appeared in TIME, The Guardian, Dawn, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, the Paris Review, and other publications. In 2013 he was named one of the world's 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. Hamid's fourth novel, Exit West (2017), is about a young couple, Nadia and Saeed, and their relationship in a time when the world is taken by storm by migrants. It was shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize. His novels have also been.... Discover the Mohsin Hamid popular books. 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Best Seller Mohsin Hamid Books of 2024
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Unspeakable Home
Ismet PrcićA stunningly original, stylistically brilliant, and brutally honest novel from an awardwinning Bosnian refugee and writer who, decades after escaping his wartorn home country looks...
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The Penguin Book of English Verse
P J KeeganThis ambitious and revelatory collection turns the traditional chronology of anthologies on its head, listing poems according to their first individual appearance in the language r...
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The Importance of Being Myrtle
Ulrika JonssonIs a death in the family the chance for a new start?When Myrtle's husband, Austin, dies on the bus one morning, everything seems to freeze. But in reality Myrtle has been frozen fo...
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American Fever
Dur e Aziz AmnaWINNER OF THE ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE USA Today Best books of August Christian Science Monitor Ten Best Books of August The Millions Most Anticipated ...
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The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio & G. H. McWilliamIn the summer of 1348, as the Black Death ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside...Taken from the Greek, meaning 'tenday event', Boccaccio's Decam...
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The Last White Man
Mohsin HamidA NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ”A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, VOGUE, AND NPR“Perhaps Hamid’s most remarkable work yet … an extraordinary ...
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Bride of the Sea
Eman QuotahArab American Book Award Winner for FictionShortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for LiteratureNamed a Best Debut Novel of the Year by BookPage and a Best Bo...
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Beyond Hope
Bariz ShahA powerful story of how one man didn't let other people define him'Bariz gifts us his truthtelling, delivered with unwavering optimism.' Matt Brown, author of She Is Not Your Rehab...
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An Ocean of Minutes
Thea LimA shortlisted finalist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the ALA 2019 Reading List for Science Fiction“Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes is that rare thinga speculative novel t...
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Exit West
Mohsin HamidFINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE & WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE “It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America ...
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UV
Serge Joncour & Adriana HunterWinner of the Prix Roman France TélévisionsOn a hot and lazy sundrenched afternoon, when one affluent family are at their most docile, most vulnerable, most ripe for the picking, a...
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Silence Is a Sense
Layla AlAmmar"This is not just good storytelling, but a blueprint for survival." The New York Times Book Review A transfixing and beautifully rendered novel about a refugee’s escape f...
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Such Good Work
Johannes LichtmanFrom Johannes Lichtman comes a wisely comic debut novel about a teacher whose efforts to stay sober land him in Sweden, but the refugee crisis forces a very different kind of recko...
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The Map of Salt and Stars
Zeyn JoukhadarThis powerful and lyrical debut novel is to Syria what The Kite Runner was to Afghanistan; the story of two girls living eight hundred years aparta modernday Syrian refugee seeking...
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The Ministry of Time
Kaliane BradleyA time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and power and the potential for love to cha...
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Bunker Man
Duncan McLeanIt is the Northwest coast of Scotland and there's a stranger in town a shambling silent hulk of a man, face hooded even at the height of summer. He hangs around school playgro...
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Where Rivers Part
Kao Kalia YangA mesmerizing and hauntingly beautiful memoir about a Hmong family’s epic journey to safety told from the perspective of the author’s incredible mother who survived, and helped her...
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Winter In Volcano
Gary Kissick'Her name was Felicia, a name Cullen liked. He wondered as he sipped his beer, what ancestral dance had produced such impish racoon eyes eyes she was fond of hiding behind over...
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Bienvenidos a Occidente
Mohsin HamidBienvenidos a Occidente es una bellísima fábula sobre los refugiados, una novela con una sólida posición ética que nos cuestiona en qué mundo queremos vivir. Por Mohsin Hamid, uno ...
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Discontent and its Civilizations
Mohsin HamidFrom the bestselling author of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West, coming in March 2017, “a nearperfect essay collection, filled with insight, compassio...