The Reluctant Fundamentalist

At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an American 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 Underwood and Samson, an elite firm thatspecializes in ‘valuation’ of companies ripe for acquisition. He thriveson New York and the intensity of his work, and his infatuation withthe beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the sameexalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But inthe wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he lovessuddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsedby the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity isin seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental thanmoney, power, and perhaps even love. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a riveting and devastating exploration of our divided and yet ultimately indivisible world, withechoes of Fitzgerald and Camus. ‘Mohsin Hamid’s exceptionally taut and gripping novel gently explores the fault lines between the American West and the Islamic East. Hamid seems to have pulled off the near impossible. This is a meditative novel written in an introspective manner…but this is also a deeply suspenseful work, the sense of anticipation heightened by Hamid’s wonderful use of restraint’—Mukund Padmanabhan in The Hindu ‘A brilliant book. With spooky restraint and masterful control, Hamid unpicks the underpinnings of the most recent episode of distrust between East and West. But his book does not merely excel in capturing a developing bitterness. The narrative is balanced by a love as powerful as the sinister forces gathering, even when it recedes into a phantom of hope. It is this balance, and the constant negotiation of the political with the personal, that creates a nuanced and complex portrait of a reluctant fundamentalist’—Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss ‘A quietly told, cleverly constructed fable of infatuation and disenchantment with America…astute cultural observation at which Hamid excels. An intelligent, highly engaging piece of work’— James Lasdun in The Guardian