“…the book is part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable for a world of porous borders and new forms of connectivity. Summarised like this, Exit West sounds as if it might lapse into shopworn tropes of world literature: a redemptive love story set against generalised violence and apocalypse, or an overbearing political allegory with some hokey magical realism thrown in. But this wry, intelligent novel eludes these and spins out its own narrative shapes. The opening scenes of a city sliding into civil war are brilliantly managed, precisely because the details are so restrained, and the encroachment of fear blended so unremarkably into the courtship of Nadia and Saeed … The magical realist doors are hardly evasions or a clunky deus ex machina — quite the opposite. Unlike many press reports on ‘the migrant crisis,’ the narrative machinery here does not fetishise the journey but focuses instead on the destination, and what might happen next. And so it seeks to imagine a future in which the experience of mass migration has become (as it has been at many other moments of human history) an inalienable fact.”
–Hedley Twidle, The Financial Times, February 24, 2017
