Excerpts from reviews of Moth Smoke:
‘Not often does one find a first novel that has the power of imagination and skill to orchestrate personal and public themes of these consequences and achieve a chord that reverberates in one’s mind... One of the two or three best novels I have read this year’ -- Nadine Gordimer
'Moth Smoke is both an irresistibly engaging adventure and a searching portrait of contemporary young people in Pakistan... The voice of the novel is its triumph, however: confiding, witty, self-lacerating, arrogant and humble, and unfailingly convincing' -- Joyce Carol Oates
‘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 (full review)
'Stunning... [Hamid] has created a hip page-turner about the mysterious country that both created the sophisticated Benazir Bhutto and hanged her father’ -- Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times (full review)
'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' -- Anita Desai, The New York Review of Books (full review)
'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' -- Richard Gehr, The Village Voice (full 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
'It's Hamid's achievement that we remain charmed by Daru throughout; the fast-paced, intelligent narration pulls us, despite ourselves, into his spiralling wake' -- The New Yorker
'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
'Moth Smoke is a sharply observed affair and a powerful meditation on personal volition... elegant and evocative... a substantial achievement' -- Financial Times
'Beautiful prose and uncomfortably acute insights suggest that Hamid has a more than promising career ahead of him' -- The Guardian
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