You may say Hamid is a dreamer. He imagines a world in which human migration becomes an unstoppable physical act, so that immigration policies and border controls are moot. Millions of refugees and migrants from poor countries step through doors and emerge in rich Western countries. The West initially tries to counter this human movement through force, people believe in scarcity and seek to protect what they have, religious teaching often being a weak force in conflict with human instinct, but fairly soon the West accepts new arrivals as nothing else can really be done, and "reports of [conflict] seemed less than apocalyptic... existence went on in tolerable safety."

But the macro view is not Hamid's focus. He does not write about policymakers, or political leaders, or national figures. He writes about individuals and how the experience of migration affects them; mostly through the characters of Saeed and Nadia (from an unnamed Mosul), but also through vignettes of other people from other places. Of one family, he writes, "That they were ashamed, and that they did not yet know that shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling, and that there was, therefore, no particular shame in being ashamed."

The novel is more dreamy than detail oriented, more magical realist that realist, touchingly written, and its lovely humanist approach to the issue of refugees and migration is certainly timely and welcome. When Hamid writes, "the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage, and in such a world the religion of the righteous must defend those who sought passage," it's a clear political and religious rallying cry for the sort of world we should aspire to. ( )

Unnamed country amidst a civil war. Two young lovers caught within the levers of a real and unreal destiny. ( )

The novel begins in an unnamed city in an unnamed country, which I immediately assumed was somewhere in Southwest Asia. The city is “swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war.” A young man and woman meet in a night-school business class, become friends, start hanging out as conditions in their city deteriorate while government forces clash with outside religious radicals and neighborhoods are destroyed one by one. The couple begins looking for rumored “doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this deathtrap of a country.” They go through several of these doors during the novel, traveling from Mykonos to London to Marin, California. I found the writing in this novel at times lyrical, but at times I had trouble following the story, wondering about people that were dropped in here and there and then disappeared from the narrative. Nevertheless, it is timely story (written in 2017) about the plight of political refugees, about war and love and humanity and nativism and community, about coupling and uncoupling. The vehicle for migration – doors people might step through on their somewhere else – hints of magic realism in which to wrap and blunt the sharp edges of difficult journeys toward the promise and hope of a better life, in the tradition of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer. ( )

Lyrically beautiful. He has such a particular writing some. Full review to come! ( )

3.5 I think. I enjoyed most of this story, especially the beginning when the reader is watching a romance unfold in a war torn city. The magical concept of doors acting as portals between countries is an interesting one and I wish this had taken a little more time to explore the stories of other couples and families that used the doors and not just Saeed and Nadia. These stories were flirted with from time to time but I wanted more.

By the end of the book I found the writing style a shade off putting. At first the removed perspective was interesting but the more I got to know the characters I wanted to shed the detachment but the book forced it upon me. ( )