Moth Smoke

The debut novel from the internationally bestselling author of Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize In contemporary Pakistan, Daru Shezad is fired from his banking job in Lahore and thus begins a decline that plummets him into a dangerous world of drugs and crime. Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke portrays a Pakistan far more vivid and complex than the exoticized images of South Asia that are oft protrayed in the West. This complex story established Mohsin Hamid as an internationally important writer of substance and imagination and the premier Pakistani author of our time, a promise he has amply fulfilled with each successive book. This debut novel, meanwhile, remains as compelling and deeply relevant to the moment as when it appeared more than a decade ago.

About the Author :
Mohsin Hamid is the author of the international bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize. His first novel, Moth Smoke, won the Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. His essays, a number of them collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

Review :
"A first novel of remarkable wit, poise, profundity, and strangeness… Hamid is a writer of gorgeous, lush prose and superb dialogue… Moth Smoke is a treat." —Esquire "Stunning… [Hamid] has created a hip page-turner about [his] mysterious country." —Los Angeles Times "A brisk, absorbing novel… inventive… trenchant… Hamid steers us from start to finish with assurance and care." —Jhumpa Lahiri, The New York Times Book Review "Pakistan, seventh most populous country in the world, is one of the countries whose literature has been overlooked. Now its chair has been taken, and looks to be occupied for years to come, by the extraordinary new novelist Mohsin Hamid." —The Philadelphia Inquirer "A subtly audacious work and prodigious descendant of hard-boiled lit and film noir… Moth Smoke is a steamy and often darkly amusing book about sex, drugs, and class warfare in postcolonial Asia." —The Village Voice "Fast-paced, intelligent." —The New Yorker "Friends, a love triangle, murder, criminal justice, hopelessness, humidity. It’s set in Lahore, there’s a beautiful woman. Her name is Mumtez and she smokes pot and cigarettes and drinks straight Scotch. Read this book. Fall in love." —Publishers Weekly "The most impressive of his gifts is the clearsightedness of his look at the power structure of a society that has shifted from the old feudalism, based on birth, to the new Pakistani feudalism based on wealth." —The New York Review of Books "Sharply observed… elegant and evocative… a substantial achievement." —Financial Times "Brilliant… As relevant now as it was upon first publication twelve years ago." —The Millions