What I Read -- Exit West

E's most recent postal book club selection was Exit West, by Moshin Hamid.  It is the story of Saeed and Nadia, a boyfriend and girlfriend drawn together by the hardship in their Middle Eastern homeland, including civil war and the death of Saeed's mother.  They secure passage to Mykonos as refugees, followed by the London suburbs, and then Marin County, California, adding to the young lovers the additional difficulty of leaving Saeed's widowed father behind, alone in the war zone.  Their relationship, predictably, suffers under the new stresses they face, and the different ways they respond to their changing environment.

I have not read any of Hamid's other books, but I might now; I very much enjoyed his writing style.  He gets to the point with well-drawn vignette, allowing them to tell the story rather than over-explaining.  His sharp "observations" (it is fiction, after all) convey the emotions of the characters to the reader without the need for further explanation, and that type of reservation in fiction writing is rare these days.