Moth Smoke

The debut novel from the internationally bestselling author of Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist , both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Moth Smoke , Mohsin Hamid’s deftly conceived first novel, immediately marked him as an uncommonly gifted and ambitious young literary talent to watch when it was published in 2000. It tells the story of Daru Shezad, who, fired from his banking job in Lahore, begins a decline that plummets the length of Hamid’s sharply drawn, subversive tale. Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke was ahead of its time in portraying a contemporary Pakistan far more vivid and complex than the exoticized images of South Asia then familiar to the West. It established Mohsin Hamid as an internationally important writer of substance and imagination and the premier Pakistani author of our time, a promise he has amply fulfilled with each successive book. This debut novel, meanwhile, remains as compelling and deeply relevant to the moment as when it appeared more than a decade ago. A portrait of contemporary Pakistan featuring an adulterous romance between two ultra-rich jet setters. He is a banker and she is the wife of his best friend, and she is escaping the constraints of marriage and motherhood by prowling the city as a journalist. When Daru Shezad is fired from his banking job he falls from the ranks of Pakistan's cell-phone-toting elite into a life of drugs and crime. But when a heist goes awry, Daru finds himself on trial for a murder he may or may not have committed