The Reluctant Fundamentalist

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE The elegant and compelling literary fiction novel about a Pakistani man’s abandonment of his high-flying life in New York—an extraordinary post-9/11 portrait of a divided and yet ultimately indivisible world. At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. He begins to tell the story of a man named Changez, who is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. His own identity enters a seismic shift as well, a profound identity crisis unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.