The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Changez is a Pakistani man sitting in a Lahore café, telling his life story to an American stranger. He went to Princeton, worked at a prestigious valuation firm in New York, loved an American woman, and watched September 11 happen from the inside of the country that would decide to blame his part of the world for it. Hamid writes the entire novel as Changez's monologue — the American never speaks, never responds, exists only as the implied listener. The most formally precise dispatch about what America looked like from the Pakistani perspective in the years after 2001. Short, exact, impossible to look away from.