Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid
Moth Smoke, Mohsin Hamid
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Moth Smoke

Author: Mohsin Hamid

Narrator: Mohsin Hamid

Unabridged: 6 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 11/16/2021

Synopsis

The debut novel from the internationally bestselling author of Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

In contemporary Pakistan, Daru Shezad is fired from his banking job in Lahore and thus begins a decline that plummets him into a dangerous world of drugs and crime. Fast-paced and unexpected, Moth Smoke portrays a Pakistan far more vivid and complex than the exoticized images of South Asia that are oft protrayed in the West.

This complex story 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.

About The Author

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the international bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both finalists for the Man Booker Prize. His first novel, Moth Smoke, won the Betty Trask Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. His essays, a number of them collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim

Daru, our protagonist, is permanently unhappy; disconnected from his feelings, his friends, his life. Perhaps this is due to the death of his mother by a stray celebratory bullet when Daru was young. Daru drifts in and out of modern elite society in Lahore, Pakistan in the late 1990's. (The book was......more

Goodreads review by Kinga

Penguin has released a new edition of Mohsin Hamid’s debut novel Moth Smoke with a slightly misleading cover. At first glance it seems that there is a couple against the sunset reaching out for each other. Excuse me while I cringe. It’s only when you take a closer look that you realise they have rat......more

Goodreads review by Komal

Once we were eating mangoes, the three of us together. I said Sindhris are my favourite. Daru said, You can't juice Sindhri, only cut them. He said, Chaunsas are my favourite because they're the best for sucking. She said, I like Anwar Ratores, because they're small and you can have two or three......more

Goodreads review by Samra

Desires see no bounds, ecstasies have no walls, ambitions are not to confine, and we are left exhausted in heat of our own passions and unsaid illusions we so love to live in, as life goes on. We are choked in sepulcher of our own doomed state, we are asphyxiated by the hands of overpowering demons......more

Quotes

"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

"Stunning… [Hamid] has created a hip page-turner about [his] mysterious country." —Los Angeles Times

"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

"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

"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." —The Village Voice

"Fast-paced, intelligent." —The New Yorker

"Friends, a love triangle, murder, criminal justice, hopelessness, humidity. It’s set in Lahore, there’s a beautiful woman. Her name is Mumtez and she smokes pot and cigarettes and drinks straight Scotch. Read this book. Fall in love." —Publishers Weekly

"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." —The New York Review of Books

"Sharply observed… elegant and evocative… a substantial achievement." —Financial Times

"Brilliant… As relevant now as it was upon first publication twelve years ago." —The Millions

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