Migrants 
 His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the woman, at the bed, at the room. Growing up in the not infrequently perilous circumstances in which he had grown up, he was aware of the fragility of his body. He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing. 
 People who have read this novel may wonder why I chose this excerpt, which begins almost frivolously. It is an incident from the beginning of the book, a throwaway character, never named, an incident that puzzles us for a moment before we pass on. Yet it says something important about Mohsin Hamid's style. As opposed to the first-person monologue of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, this has an omniscient narrator. Well, maybe not omniscient, but playful, refusing to close off all the possibilities as he looks down with elegant detachment. Yet when describing some of the ordeals his characters pass through, he is much more detailed than the abstract list here: we get the groping hand between the buttocks, the knife pressed to the neck, the blood dripping between the floorboards. Realism and detachment, in a perfect balance that is the novel's singular triumph. 
 In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. 
 The opening sentence of the novel, perfect in its way with its open-ended suggestion of the future. Or rather two futures: that of the city not yet at war, and that of the young man and woman who do not speak. Of course they will; another reason I chose my opening quote is its statement that "alone a person is almost nothing." This will become a love story of sorts: the young man, Saeed, will fall for Nadia, a young woman much more liberated than her all-enveloping black veil would indicate. Together they will face the weeks in which open war breaks out, the militants (think the Taliban or ISIS) take over, and men get their throats cut for having the wrong surname. Detached or not, in his first hundred pages, Hamid gave me a stronger, more visceral sense of what it is to live in a war zone than anything else I can remember. 
 Then Saeed and Nadia escape. I won't say how (though others might). Hamid's detached tone enables him to throw in a touch of magic realism that passes over the logistics of things that don't interest him in favor of the psychological realities that do. For the second half of the book is about migrants, a world of migrants, from all over the world. Hamid does not worry about how these people get from place to place, but he is very concerned about the details of the living conditions they will find, their relationships with the local people, and especially the changes they will discover in themselves. For both Saeed and Nadia will change as a result of their experiences; as Hamid is an optimistic writer, and his leading characters are strong, good people, both will grow, in ways that seem as inevitable as they are unexpected. 
 All the same, the change of gear at the half-way point, the shift from external action to inner feeling, is a risky strategy. For a while, I found myself questioning the enthusiastic five stars I had given the book at first. But then I came to the final sentence, ending in another of those future-possible phrases so exquisitely balanced it brought tears to my eyes. [I don't think it gives anything away unless you know the context, but I will put it in as a spoiler in case.] 
 (view spoiler)[He nodded and said that if she had an evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing in this life, and she shut her eyes and said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did not know, then, if that evening would ever come.Could anything be more perfectly judged than that word "then"? 
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