This Event is Online

We are thrilled to invite you to the capstone event of Community Reads @ Home where Mohsin Hamid, will join us from Pakistan for an online discussion of Exit West with our in-house journalist Angie Coiro. This is one literary conversation you do not want to miss.

Community Reads @ Home, launched by Kepler's and Menlo Park Library, is designed to broaden our mission to engage, enrich, and inspire our community through literature. Since early April, our whole community has been coming together to read the same book, participate in discussions with friends and family, and develop greater understanding of our human condition. This evening’s event is the culmination of that shared literary experience.

In Exit West, Hamid chronicles the lives of two young lovers from an unnamed country at the onset of civil war. Nadia and Saeed flee their ancestral home through a series of special portals taking them across the world, and eventually to Marin County. This is an intimate story about displacement and leaving the people you love, but also a story of courage, loyalty, and our need for connection.

This book raises important issues of borders and immigration, the use of technology for surveillance, one’s sense of identity and family, and how we define global community. We hope that reading Exit West will bring greater understanding of the universality of the migration experience, and living in uncertainty, as this hauntingly beautiful sentence from the book states, "We are all migrants through time."

Exit West was New York Times Best Book of the Year (2017), winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It has been a staff favorite at Kepler’s and at the Menlo Park Library. Barack Obama called it one of the best books he read in 2017. Exit West is being adapted into a feature film for Netflix.

Mohsin Hamid is an award-winning author from Lahore, Pakistan. He has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.