Book cover of The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Book description

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE

The elegant and compelling novel about a Pakistani man’s abandonment of his high-flying life in New York—an extraordinary portrait of a divided and yet ultimately indivisible world in America post-9/11.

At a café…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Reluctant Fundamentalist as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The book captures the picture-perfect life of a brown-skinned immigrant who finds it all rose-tinted living it up in New York.

The scales fall after 9/11 when faced with shifting allegiances and overt suspicions. The author slowly builds up a gnawing tension as we wait for the protagonist to teeter over the edge, as the isolation and resentment eats away inside him spiraling into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The book touched me as a person of South Asian descent, having faced unconscious bias. The book delineates the perspective of “the other”, where the unfamiliar is made to feel like a convenient…

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