Mohsin Hamid
Riverhead Books
didn’t involve a life-or-death journey across national boundaries but instead anyone could walk, a magic realist novel about migration, displacement, and love. Saeed and Nadia contemplate leaving their city when militants overthrow the government and daily life becomes deadly. The couple investigate rumors of the sudden appearance of magical portals to other places. Their first door leads them to Greece, where they find safety, but they grow restless when they learn of a global network of doors—heavily guarded doors to richer countries, mostly ignored doors to poorer places. Migration from danger to security, from want to plenty, is what our species does, but to residents a migrant is too often “other.” “Take away the journey,” said Hamid in an interview, “and you have a person who was in one place, and now is in a different place, something that happens to all of us.”
