Moshin Hamid - Exit West (Penguin, 2017) **½

In "Exit West", two young people, Saeed and Nadia, try to find the hidden door to flee to the West in order to escape the oppressive religious regime in which they live. The first part of the book is about their love in their home country, their shy efforts at physical and intimate contact, and all this in the context of political tension. The second, shorter part is about their lives once they've succeeded in escaping: the problems of becoming accepted in their new place, carving out their own new lives, and finding each other again.

Even if the novel is not entirely predictable - I won't say how - most of the time it is. It is about the plight of people living in countries such as Iran, unable to live their life to the full, and the disappointment and opportunities in their new home country as refugees. But Hamid's narrative falls short of the real predicament of people in this situation. It is neither brutal nor really gripping. He describes the characters more than making them come to life, his story unfolds as written by an omniscient narrator who looks upon his subject matter from a distance, in a very clinical way.

The plight of migrants deserves literary attention, but the fact that it happens, does not make it necessarily great literature.