“… what awaits is little less than the collective responsibility we all have as readers and dwellers. “

Any writer makes a contract with a reader at the start of a work: the reader promises a sincere effort to read; the writer promises value in its completion. This could not have paid off more handsomely, more profoundly, than in this novel.

Our main characters are real, fitting inconveniently into their fictional culture as one does, in communities ruptured as often happens, and made refugees, migrants, as too many are. The novel works, then, as a dialogue between the micro (the relationship between Saeed and Nadia) and the macro (a world compelled to confront the immigrant experience): relationships of choice and of compulsion. Fittingly, and without spoilers, Hamid’s closing chapters pull these together in poetic epiphany for us, even if all his characters never quite get it.  

Accept the character asides, accept the narrator’s distanced omniscience, accept the conceitIn literature, allowing a metaphor or unexpected comparison ... More which propels the novel into its collisions–what awaits is little less than the collective responsibility we all have as readers and dwellers. 

Why not five stars? If anything, Hamid is too modest in his ambition, in the depths of his explorations, opting instead for a quickly told short work which might do more still than call the question.