Works by
Mohsin Hamid
(Writer)

Moth Smoke (2000) -- Finalist 2001 PEN/Hemingway Award
When Daru loses his job as a banker in Lahore, he begins a long fall from grace that cascades the length of this lively and inventive tale. Too clever for his own good, he descends into drug dealing, then heroin addiction. Unable to pay the electricity bill, he rapidly loses power, literally and metaphorically, in a society increasingly polarized between decadent haves and discontented have-nots. As Daru spirals downward, he is falling for beautiful, mysterious Mumtaz, the wife of his childhood friend and rival, Ozi. Privileged but restless, Mumtaz escapes the constraints of marriage and motherhood by prowling the city's depths as a journalist. Daru is drawn to her with an intensity that mimics the attraction of moths to candle flames in his darkened apartment. Desperate to reverse his fortunes, Daru takes a partner in crime, the rickshaw driver Murad, but when a heist goes awry, Daru finds himself on trial for a murder he may or may not have committed. The uncertainty of his future mirrors that of his country, which is locked in a jittery nuclear test-for-test with India, as the rich get richer and fundamentalist fervor intensifies. With its assured voice-in equal measure funny, ironic, and impassioned-highly original cast of characters, and sly satire, this debut novel is never less than riveting.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter . . .

Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.

But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned and his relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a riveting, brilliantly unsettling exploration of the shadowy, unexpected connections between the political and the personal.