The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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Harcourt, 2007 - Fiction - 184 pages
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE

The elegant and compelling novel about a Pakistani man's abandonment of his high-flying life in New York--an extraordinary portrait of a divided and yet ultimately indivisible world in America post-9/11.

At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. He begins to tell the story of a man named Changez, who is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.

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About the author (2007)

Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was published in ten languages, won a Betty Trask Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His essays and journalism have appeared in Time, the New York Times and the Guardian, among others. His latest novel is The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) published by Penguin. He will be featured at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2015 program. He is the author of Exit West, which in 2018, won the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize.

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