Just finished Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I am knocked out by both the writing and the story. I don’t know how he does that – keep the prose so spare and yet so vivid and rich. It is as if there is not a single misplaced word in the whole text. I love the way this astonishing monologue sways on an invisible fulcrum between the story and the immediate surroundings. It never jars. There is both dialogue and description and yet only one voice. There are new truths and perspectives. I don’t think you could ask more from a novel.

As you can see it is wipeout for this writer, as I try to look at the quiet engineering behind the prose and attempt to learn something – anything – from this example.