The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Changez tells his story to a silent American stranger in a Lahore café and the monologue becomes a portrait of belonging withdrawn. Princeton, Wall Street, New York — then 9/11 and the cold realisation that he was always provisional. Hamid writes the un-belonging of the assimilated with forensic patience. The reader, like the American stranger, cannot know what will happen when the monologue ends.