The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Changez is a Princeton-educated Pakistani man who worked at a top Manhattan valuation firm and watched the towers fall and felt, briefly, something he's not supposed to admit. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is structured as his monologue addressed to an American stranger in a Lahore tea shop — the American may or may not be CIA; the ending does not tell you. The ironic title, the shifting address, the way the form requires the reader to narrate the American character themselves — the novel traps its audience inside their own assumptions and makes the American explain himself for once. Hamid wrote this in 2007. It is not past tense.