
Moth Smoke
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Narrated by:
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Mohsin Hamid
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By:
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Mohsin Hamid
About this listen
The debut novel from the internationally best-selling 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.
©2012 Mohsin Hamid (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the boldly imagined tale of a poor boy's quest for wealth and love. His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world's pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation - and exceeds it.
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The title is misleading, I loved this quick read.
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Mohsin Hamid's brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international best seller, they have earned him a reputation as a "master critic of the modern global condition" ( Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family, identity. Here, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political.
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Thought-Provoking Essays by Mohsin Hamid
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Excellent Narration
- By Anonymous User on 04-04-25
By: Mohsin Hamid
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Overall
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Performance
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One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth—an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.
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The title is misleading, I loved this quick read.
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Overall
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In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet - sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors - doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice.
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By: Mohsin Hamid
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Discontent and Its Civilizations
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- By: Mohsin Hamid
- Narrated by: Mohsin Hamid
- Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mohsin Hamid's brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international best seller, they have earned him a reputation as a "master critic of the modern global condition" ( Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family, identity. Here, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political.
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Critic reviews
"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)
"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)
What listeners say about Moth Smoke
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Danielle Simchick
- 10-07-24
Tragic, yet justified!
The main character pursues a life that gradually spins more out of control. You love him and hate him at the same time. The story is overall tragic, but yet justified. It's a mix of drama, tragedy, friendship, and romance.
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- Kevin
- 01-13-22
Innovative in style and substance
There is no other author I'd rather read right now than Hamid. Having absolutely loved his recent works, Exit West and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, I eagerly sought out this early novel, which my library was unable to obtain. Moth Smoke was well worth the effort. The emotional impact of Exit West and the innovative voices and structure of How to get Filthy Rich can find their roots in this novel. The story follows Daru, a out-of-work and depressed Pakistani who finds himself a witness to a crime. We follow him as he spirals into an affair and drug use. But the story is much more than Daru's story. It gives us an insight into Lahore and the societal structures there. By jumping perspectives, and even from first, second, and third-person storytelling, Hamid paints a picture of a Lahore ruled by an educated and elite 1% while people like Daru are unable to get ahead. Still, Daru's decisions blaze his own path.
Hamid structures stories like no other. His ability to use second-person structures to insert the reader into the narrative is highly effective here as well as in How to Get Filthy Rich. While he expertly plays with style, he never neglects the emotional impact of his stories. I've left each of his books emotionally impacted. Any of Hamid's novels are a good place to start. Moth Smoke, while not as tightly crafted as his others, showcases the innovative talent of this truly unique author.
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- Huffie
- 01-05-23
Tracing Mohsin Hamid’s Literary Development
This audible book is a way of going back to look at the author’s earliest work. His skilled with setting, including political, historical context, is excellent. The seeds of the Seims and his leader work are also here in this first novel. As a novel, Moth Smoke is only a foreshadowing of what Hamid does with The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and that is what makes it worth reading or listening to: it captures the early struggles of a literary genius who was still unsure of the stories he would narrate, the perspectives on our world he might provide us with…
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