The last white man

Hamid's (Exit West, 2017) latest concise, powerful novel begins when Anders awakens one day to find that his previously white skin has inexplicably darkened and his body has become unrecognizable. Concealing his transformation from everyone except Oona, his casual romantic partner, Anders grapples with his changed appearance and fears facing the world as a stranger in his own life. Meanwhile, Oona, still reeling from the tragic death of a loved one and saddled with the care of her aging, vulnerable, and racist mother, is still figuring out what her relationship to Anders means while also learning to cope in a rapidly destabilizing world. As more and more people begin to change skin color, Anders and Oona navigate through their new world, contending with both societal and personal upheaval. Though the spare prose effectively conveys an underlying sense of doom and violence on the periphery for most of the novel, the story ultimately surprises. Hamid imaginatively takes on timely, universal topics, including identity, grief, community, family, race, and what it means to live through sudden and often violent change.

On the first page of Hamid's underwhelming latest (after Exit West), a white man named Anders wakes up to find he has mysteriously "turned a deep and undeniable brown." From this Kafkaesque beginning, Hamid spins a timely if unsatisfying racial allegory in which, one after another, the white inhabitants of an unnamed country become dark-skinned. Hamid mutes the power by harnessing his plot to the dishwater-dull Anders, who works at a gym, and his equally bland girlfriend, Oona, a yoga instructor. The lack of social context is also puzzling, with the story set in an unspecified time and place largely stripped of historical and cultural detail. Hamid employs a cool, spare prose style with little dialogue, leaving the reader to feel like the action of the novel is taking place behind a wall of soundproof glass. The glass briefly shatters when white militants come for Anders, though the author quickly turns back the threat. Later, when Oona's mother, who indulges in right-wing conspiracy theories, is sickened by the sight of her white daughter in bed with dark-skinned Anders, Hamid taps the rich potential of his premise. For the most part, though, this remains stubbornly inert. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (Aug.)

At the beginning of Mohsin Hamid's (Exit West) dreamlike new novel, a white man named Anders wakes to discover that his skin "has turned a deep, undeniable brown." At first, Anders reveals the change only to his on-again, off-again lover Oona, but they soon discover that Anders is not the only white person to have changed. Anders and Oona grapple with their parents' and their own reactions to the change, as the town descends into chaos around them, with some of the remaining white men forming militias and peddling conspiracy theories online. The author reads the novel, which is light on dialogue and full of looping, peripatetic sentences that reflect the characters' inner thoughts and memories but leave the setting and specifics of the plot hazy. Hamid narrates with a measured tone that matches the sense of distance created by the prose. VERDICT Listeners looking for distinctive voices and high emotion may be disappointed, but fans of Hamid's allegorical storytelling will enjoy this thought-provoking novel, paired with Hamid's restrained performance.--Emily Calkins

A brilliantly realized allegory of racial transformation. Hamid's latest opens with a scenario worthy of Kafka: A young man named Anders awakens "to find he [has] turned a deep and undeniable brown." Faced with the shock of this metamorphosis, he punches the mirror that reveals the stranger who is he. He then calls in sick, at which his boss growls, "You don't work, you don't get paid." Meanwhile, his old girlfriend, Oona, returns to the unnamed town--perhaps somewhere in South Africa, although, this being a fairy tale of sorts, it's in an aoristic nowhere--and takes up with the new Anders even as Oona's mother sighs that "our people" are changing. It's true, for the whole town is slowly turning brown. Writes Hamid in a characteristically onrushing sentence, "The mood in town was changing, more rapidly than its complexion, for Anders could not as yet per-ceive any real shift in the number of dark people on the streets...but the mood, yes, the mood was changing, and the shelves of the stores were more bare, and at night the roads were more abandoned." Anders returns to work at a local gym, where he finds that the few remaining White people are looking at him with "quick, evasive stares," no longer trusting the man they called "doc" for his sore-muscle healing powers. When Anders' father--the last White man of Hamid's title--dies, there are no more of the "pale people who wandered like ghosts" in the town, and as time passes those who are left slowly lose their "memories of whiteness." Hamid's story is poignant and pointed, speaking to a more equitable future in which widespread change, though confusing and dislocating in the moment, can serve to erase the divisions of old as they fade away with the passing years. A provocative tale that raises questions of racial and social justice at every turn. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Hamid's (Exit West, 2017) latest concise, powerful novel begins when Anders awakens one day to find that his previously white skin has inexplicably darkened and his body has become unrecognizable. Concealing his transformation from everyone except Oona, his casual romantic partner, Anders grapples with his changed appearance and fears facing the world as a stranger in his own life. Meanwhile, Oona, still reeling from the tragic death of a loved one and saddled with the care of her aging, vulnerable, and racist mother, is still figuring out what her relationship to Anders means while also learning to cope in a rapidly destabilizing world. As more and more people begin to change skin color, Anders and Oona navigate through their new world, contending with both societal and personal upheaval. Though the spare prose effectively conveys an underlying sense of doom and violence on the periphery for most of the novel, the story ultimately surprises. Hamid imaginatively takes on timely, universal topics, including identity, grief, community, family, race, and what it means to live through sudden and often violent change. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.

Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, a secret he initially shares only with new lover Oona. But soon people everywhere are being transformed, raising tough questions. How can you recognize friends and family? Can you love them as you once did, changed as they are? And is the old social order, with its attendant prejudices, about to be tossed out the window? Sharp-edged political/fantastical allegory from two-time Booker Prize finalist Hamid.

Hamid's latest is yet another imaginative pivot for the formally adventurous author, revisiting the magical realist texture of Exit West but with a more overtly parable quality. This short novel features Anders, who wakes up one day to find that his skin has suddenly turned dark. In the aftermath of this surreal upset to his life, he reconnects with old friend Oona, and they embark on a new relationship as the world around them continues to change. Occupying a liminal space recalling Kafka's The Metamorphosis or José Saramago's Blindness, but with the more relaxed feel of a fairy tale, the narrative proves to be both markedly intelligent and surprisingly empathetic. In taking on the inherently dehumanizing effects of race on the individual and showing how so many must unmake or unknow their identities as their skin darkens—and thus evolve toward a more loving humanity as they see the world anew—Hamid bespeaks compassion rather than anger or malignant consequence, eschewing grand worldbuilding for a deeply intimate and remarkably gentle tale. A certain slightness to the text keeps it from reaching the brilliant heights of Exit West, but Hamid maximizes his spartan framework emotionally and discursively, delivering a novel that lingers and expands long after its final, delicate pages. VERDICT A provocative and welcomingly unpredictable work, taking readers to deeply humane places and through moving considerations that similar works rarely visit.—Luke Gorham

Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, a secret he initially shares only with new lover Oona. But soon people everywhere are being transformed, raising tough questions. How can you recognize friends and family? Can you love them as you once did, changed as they are? And is the old social order, with its attendant prejudices, about to be tossed out the window? Sharp-edged political/fantastical allegory from two-time Booker Prize finalist Hamid.

On the first page of Hamid's underwhelming latest (after Exit West), a white man named Anders wakes up to find he has mysteriously "turned a deep and undeniable brown." From this Kafkaesque beginning, Hamid spins a timely if unsatisfying racial allegory in which, one after another, the white inhabitants of an unnamed country become dark-skinned. Hamid mutes the power by harnessing his plot to the dishwater-dull Anders, who works at a gym, and his equally bland girlfriend, Oona, a yoga instructor. The lack of social context is also puzzling, with the story set in an unspecified time and place largely stripped of historical and cultural detail. Hamid employs a cool, spare prose style with little dialogue, leaving the reader to feel like the action of the novel is taking place behind a wall of soundproof glass. The glass briefly shatters when white militants come for Anders, though the author quickly turns back the threat. Later, when Oona's mother, who indulges in right-wing conspiracy theories, is sickened by the sight of her white daughter in bed with dark-skinned Anders, Hamid taps the rich potential of his premise. For the most part, though, this remains stubbornly inert. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (Aug.)