Tag: literary fiction

Book Review – Exit West by Mohsin Hamid #20BooksofSummer2025

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About the Book

In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, two young people notice one another.

They share a cup of coffee, a smile, an evening meal. They try not to hear the sound of bombs getting closer every night, the radio announcing new laws, the public executions.

Meanwhile, rumours are spreading of strange black doors in secret places across the city, doors that lead to London or San Francisco, Greece or Dubai. Someday soon, the time will come for this young couple to seek out one such door: joining the multitudes fleeing a collapisng city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world.

Format: Hardcover (229 pages) Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Publication date: 2nd March 2017 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

I approached Exit West with some trepidation having struggled with novels with elements of magical realism in the past. I wasn’t sure I could embrace the concept of doors through which you pass to other parts of the world. As it turned out, I liked how the author concentrated on the motivations for migration, the experience of those who migrate and the response of those on the receiving end of migration rather than details of migrants’ journeys. The doors concept allowed this simplicity and I think also emphasised the suddenness of the transition that migrants experience.

The story begins in an unnamed war-torn city that most readers, given when the book was written, have assumed to be Syria although, sadly, today it could just as easily be many other countries around the world. The conflict makes use of modern technology such as drones giving it a slightly dystopian feel.

Although different in personality and background, Saeed and Nadia meet and fall in love. Soon, however, it becomes clear there is no future for them in the city in which they live and they use an intermediary to exit via one of the doors, ending up first in Greece, later in London.

But wherever they go they often find themselves in a similar situation: living in basic conditions in workers camps or as squatters in sealed off neighbourhoods. As more and more people use the doors, dodging or bribing guards to gain access, there is conflict – sometimes violent conflict – with ‘nativists’ who resent the influx of people from different cultures, who speak different languages and have different religious practices. In some places, the migrants face attack by government forces. It leads Nadia to wonder if they have swapped one bad situation for another. ‘The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed to familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered if she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.’

Their experiences gradually change Saeed and Nadia’s relationship, each responding in different ways to their new situation. Saeed’s instinctive reaction is to seek out people similar to himself and put down roots, Nadia’s impulse is to move on in search of some indefinable ‘something else’.

Interspersed with Saeed and Nadia’s story are brief vignettes describing the experiences of others who travel through the doors. One particularly heart-warming story demonstrates how migration can help forge new connections.

Exit West as well as being beautifully written is definitely a book to get you thinking. For instance I was struck by the notion that we are all migrants of a sort, migrants through time. That even if we stay in the same place, things change around us over time and we must adapt to them.

Exit West is book two of my 20 Books of Summer 2025.

In three words: Thought-provoking, insightful, imaginative

About the Author

Mohsin Hamid is the author of four novels, Moth Smoke , The Reluctant Fundamentalist , How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia , and Exit West , and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, selected as winner or finalist of twenty awards, and translated into thirty-five languages.

Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

Connect with Mohsin
Website

Book Review – SPIT by David Brennan

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About the Book

Welcome to the village of Spit, where Danny Mulcahy is losing the run of himself, and where, as he and his friends dream of escaping, an unexpected death sets the rumour mill into motion.

Suffering an unexplained, perpetual banishment the Spook of Spit is watching everyone and everything – nothing goes unnoticed. Bearing witness to the village’s half-truths and suppressed secrets, fragments of its own dark and obscured history are unveiled.

As events spiral out of control, the past, present and future are set to collide. Can there be redemption for past deeds? How do you escape when you are fated to remain? What does it take to break free from the confines of Spit?

Format: ebook (279 pages) Publisher: époque press
Publication date: 17th June 2025 Genre: Literary Fiction

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My Review

‘I once inhabitated the body of a dead dog for two weeks.’

From its opening line you know you’re about to enter a strange world of the author’s imagination. SPIT is a story that marries the struggles of everyday life in an Irish village with the challenging nature of the unending afterlife.

Much of the book is narrated by the ghost of Spit. If it isn’t a contradiction in terms, he’s having an existential crisis. Apart from occasional fragments of past events that come to the surface, he cannot recall who he was in life – although he thinks he might have been a bard – or why he is tied to the village of Spit. ‘It’s only in my dreams I can leave Spit.’ But then by his reckoning he’s been dead over six hundred years so perhaps the memory lapse is to be forgiven.

The ghost is the unseen witness to everything that goes on in Spit, able to remain invisible or take other forms such as a goat (one of his favourites) or, memorably, a wasp in a marmalade jar. He is often the unseen, sole companion of the dead or dying, and is drawn by some invisible force to significant events. However, much like the spirits in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, he is powerless to intervene to change the course of events. ‘I can see them, feel them, taste them, be them even, but I can never alter the nature of their fates. This is my curse.’ His whispered advice goes unheeded and his conversations are by definition one-sided. It’s a lonely life, an eternally lonely life. I have to admit, the ghost was my favourite thing about the book.

Danny Mulcahy is on a metaphorical road to nowhere, drinking himself into oblivion. To be fair, he’s not alone because much of the life of the village is centred on its pubs. ‘Mondays, Tuesday, long days, in the half darkness, the men of Spit know how to drink, day to day, generation to generation.’ Danny’s got to the point where after a night’s drinking he experiences blackouts leaving him with no memory of what he might have done or how he got to the place he wakes up. Inconvenient when one of your best friends dies in mysterious circumstances.

Danny has a troubled relationship with his father, the local police sergeant, who considers him a failure. It’s an assessment Danny shares, to be fair. Family meal times are a silent affair imbued with a constant sense things could kick off at any minute thanks to his father’s short temper. Danny’s life is not a neverending downward spiral though. There are times when his future looks brighter: a period of sobriety and a relationship with a much admired young woman from the village. Only the ghost is witness to the rather gruesome activities she gets up to when alone (or so she thinks). Spit is like a whirlpool that is constantly trying to drag you down and only the strongest, most determined will survive.

SPIT is an unusual book – in a good way. I enjoyed its acutely observed portrait of human failings and its dark humour. But do remember the words of the ghost of Spit: ‘If you wake up screaming in the middle of the night haunted by some nightmare then I’m likely to be sitting on your chest looking into your eyes.’

My thanks to Sean at époque press for my digital review copy.

In three words: Imaginative, intense, witty
Try something similar: Villager by Tom Cox

About the Author

David Brennan won the Frank O’Connor Mentorship Bursary Award in 2016 and in 2017 he was longlisted for the Colm Tobin Award. He was one of the winners of the Irish Novel Fair in 2018 with his debut novel, Upperdown, which was published by époque press in June 2019.

David lives and writes in China and SPIT is David’s second novel.