Discontent and Its Civilizations

From the bestselling author of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Exit West coming in March 2017 “a near-perfect essay collection filled with insight compassion and intellect. (NPR) Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant moving and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international bestseller they have earned him a reputation as a “master critic of the modern global condition” (Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment and his themes are universal: love language ambition power corruption religion family identity. Here he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political and are shot through with the same passion imagination and breathtaking shifts of perspective that gives his fiction its unmistakable electric charge. A “water lily” who has called three countries on three continents his home—Pakistan the birthplace to which he returned as a young father; the United States where he spent his childhood and young adulthood; and Britain where he married and became a citizen—Hamid writes about overlapping worlds with fluidity and penetrating insight. Whether he is discussing courtship rituals or pop culture drones or the rhythms of daily life in an extended family compound he transports us beyond the scarifying headlines of an anxious West and a volatile East beyond stereotype and assumption and helps to bring a dazzling diverse global culture within emotional and intellectual reach.