Predictably enough, this is most obvious in scenes of outright violence as militants close in on their city prey. Exit West confidently adopts yet another kind of voice – a tone of radical simplicity that in the opening 50-odd pages borders on brutality, and makes every conversation, every detail, every scene feel at once vital and under threat. In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid ingeniously adapts the form of a self-help book to create a tale-telling “you” who becomes intimately realised while remaining a nameless everyman. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist we eavesdrop on a marvellously well-sustained dramatic monologue that reveals a great deal about its speaker, while also concealing precisely what he intends to do to his listener. In previous novels, Hamid has used a heavily inflected narrative voice to filter everything through a personality that is not his own, but which he nevertheless owns as the author. Nadia, to begin with at least, is “not certain exactly what she was feeling, but was certain it had force”. Nadia is less straightforward-seeming: she doesn’t pray but wears a “conservative and virtually all‑concealing black robe”, works in an insurance company but rides a “scuffed-up hundred-ish cc trail bike”, has veered off from her parents and lives alone.

Saeed is “an independent-minded, grown man, unmarried, with a decent post and a good education”.

S aeed and Nadia meet at an evening class in an unnamed, presumably Middle Eastern city “swollen by refugees” but not yet “openly at war”.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid