The Last White Man

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY TIME, ELLE, USA TODAY, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY AND MORE

“Perhaps Hamid’s most remarkable work yet … an extraordinary vision of human possibility.” –Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

“Searing, exhilarating … reimagines Kafka’s iconic The Metamorphosis for our racially charged era.” Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change.

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.Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. 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.
 
In Mohsin Hamid’s “lyrical and urgent” prose (O Magazine), The Last White Man powerfully uplifts our capacity for empathy and the transcendence over bigotry, fear, and anger it can achieve.Praise for The Last White Man:

“A fantastical exploration of race and privilege. . . . In an age aflame with strident tweets, Hamid offers swelling remorse and expansive empathy. Such a story could only be written by an author who is entirely candid about his awkward journey along the racial spectrum. . . . It anticipates that sweet day — not forever deferred, surely — when we finally close the casket on the whole horrific construct of racial hierarchies and see each other for what we are.” —The Washington Post

“Fantastical treatments of race have long served to underscore just how absurd it is that this social construct should wield so much power. Hamid’s novel follows in this legacy, challenging readers to consider the ways in which something as superficial as the color of one’s skin holds sway in their lives.” —TIME

“A moral fable for our entire harrowing world. . . . exquisitely evoked by Hamid in a mesmerizing, serpentine style. . . .The Last White Man offers its own small ray of light.” —Los Angeles Times

“Searing, exhilarating. . . . reimagines Kafka’s iconic The Metamorphosis for our racially charged era. … Hamid brings a restless, relentless brilliance to his characters’ journeys and the revelations, public and private, that inform us all. … Gorgeously crafted, morally authoritative, The Last White Man concludes on a note of hope, a door jarred open just enough to let transcendence pour through.” —Oprah Daily

“It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that this book is entirely about race. Yet what grips the reader throughout are the relationships that shift and turn, each according to the capacity not to tolerate but to see another human being fully, and to meet them exactly where they are….What is miraculous, truly miraculous, Hamid shows us, is that anyone permits love.” —The Boston Globe

“The story thrives on the tension that occurs between the contrast of the new self against the old one within the same individual. . . .  a compelling illustration of the damages wrought by confusing biology with ideology.” —Chicago Review of Books
 
“Hamid’s likely readers already know race is a ‘construct’ that we could do nicely without. . . . But whether deliberately or not — and Hamid’s too smart a writer not to know what he’s doing — The Last White Man has an additional agenda: to destabilize not just our toxic imaginings but our conventional notions of fiction itself.” —New York Times Book Review

“[A] tale of poignant magical realism. . . . Haunting and arresting in equal measure.” —Elle

“A fever dream of a story. . . . Well worth the ride.” —Associated Press

“At its heart, this is a novel about seeing, being seen, loss and letting go. . . . In the hands of such a deft and humane writer as Hamid, a bizarre construct is moved far beyond any mere ‘what if’ . . . . Making strange what we find familiar, he reminds us of our capacity to break beyond our limited visions of each other.” —Guardian

“The great staging of Hamid’s work is intimacy; the grooves of human attachment his sole preoccupation. He is among the foremost diviners of partnership: of friendships, lifetime loves, and shattered marriages. Of how love is crystalized, of everything love can hold, what it can and will withstand across time. He understands—and in return makes us understand—our cavernous need for another, that somewhere bone-deep we cannot make it alone.” —WIRED

“[Hamid’s] surreal narratives are just-the-other-side-of-plausible because they’re tethered to once-improbable realities…[he] writes with on-the-ground immediacy that draws readers in.” —NPR Fresh Air
 
“A moving fable.” —GQ
 
“Beautiful. . . . There are people I love right now who are in a lot of pain these days. And nothing I’ve read gave me more access to them, or felt like it did, than this book.” —Ezra Klein

“An effective allegory on race and racism in America. . . . Thoughtful writers like Hamid are essential.” —Star Tribune

“What does hatred of the other become, this haunting story asks, when we ourselves become the other?” —Tampa Bay Times

“A Kafka-centric allegory on racism and the loss of white privilege. . . . The Last White Man begs the question of how deep the well of empathy and unity runs, making this an engaging read book-lovers don’t want to miss.” —PopSugar

“An emotionally gut-punching exploration of race, privilege, grief, and white anxiety.” —Mother Jones

“A frighteningly timely allegory about welcome forms of progress and the fears of people unable or unwilling to grow.” – Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“A brilliantly realized allegory of racial transformation. . . . Hamid’s story is poignant and pointed, speaking to a more equitable future in which widespread change, though confusing and dislocating in the moment, can serve to erase the divisions of old as they fade away with the passing years. A provocative tale that raises questions of racial and social justice at every turn.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Hamid. . . reminds us yet again that fiction sometimes provides the most direct path to truth.” —BookPage (starred review)

“Concise, powerful. . . . Hamid imaginatively takes on timely, universal topics, including identity, grief, community, family, race, and what it means to live through sudden and often violent change.” —Booklist

“With one remarkable book after another, Mohsin Hamid has proven himself to be one of the 21st century’s most essential writers. This is, perhaps, his most remarkable work yet. THE LAST WHITE MAN is myth and poetry operating as a deeper form of social commentary, and an extraordinary vision of human possibility.” —Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

Praise for Mohsin Hamid:

“Hamid’s enticing strategy is to foreground the humanity. . . . [He] exploits fiction’s capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Lyrical and urgent . . . peels away the dross of bigotry to expose the beauty of our common humanity.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Feels immediately canonical, so firm and unerring is Hamid’s understanding of our time and its most pressing questions.” —The New YorkerMohsin Hamid is the author of five novels, including the Booker Prize finalists and New York Times bestsellers Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. His essays, some collected as Discontent and Its Civilizations, have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He divides his time between Lahore, New York, and London.

1. When Anders and Oona each change skin color, they consider the ways in which they feel like the same person and the ways in which they don’t. The narrative reflects how they perceive others who change color and how others seem to perceive them. What is the book exploring about the relationship between appearance and identity? What questions does it raise about how we conceive of identity itself?

2. The novel uses the terms “white” and “whiteness” throughout, but never “Black” or any other vocabulary of race. Nor for that matter does it give a specific name to the location where the story takes place—in fact, it includes no proper names, other than those of Anders and Oona. What is the effect on the reader of having such familiar labels—and even the very habit of labeling—stripped away?

3. The narrative appears to enter without judgment, even with sympathy, into the experiences and attitudes of all four principal characters—Anders, Oona, Anders’s father, and Oona’s mother—indeed, into their behaviors and mindsets at their most disturbing. Why do you think Hamid made such a narrative choice? What was the impact on you as you read?

4. Much of the initial response to the changes in skin color that are sweeping the unnamed land of the novel is violent: militias form, vigilantism takes hold. Gradually the tide turns toward peace. What impulses fuel the violence? How and why do alternative responses emerge? 

5. Oona and Anders have each lost a parent, and Oona has also lost her brother to suicide. How do these past losses affect them in the present? How do the losses shape their relationships with their surviving parents, and how do the losses bring the two of them together?

6. It’s Anders’s father who proves to be the “last white man” of the title. Considerable detail is devoted to his dying, Anders’s care of him, and the dynamics from the past and present that this death calls up in Anders. How did this aspect of the narrative strike you? How do you perceive its relationship to the theme of unstoppable change and the response to it in the broader arc of the novel?

7. Oona’s mother’s reaction to the changes in the people around her in general, and to those in her daughter in particular, is more overtly dramatic than that of Anders’s father to the changes around him, and Oona’s relationship with her mother is portrayed as more contentious than that of Anders with his father. After her mother changes, Oona is surprised to feel a positive effect, and she finds she does not know “in retrospect, if things truly had been as precarious as she had imagined them to be.” What does this turn of events, perceptions, and memory suggest?

8. The characters in the book experience the events occurring in the world around them both directly and indirectly, as they are covered in the news and on the internet, and they respond to these inputs in very different ways. What is the novel observing about the role of perception, interpretation, and agency in a media-saturated, highly mediated world?

9. Oona and Anders’s daughter, like all children in the generation born after the change, has no memory or concept of whiteness. How does her arrival in the story shift its course? How did you feel about the ending of the book?

10. Hamid has written that the novel was inspired by his post-9/11 “profound sense of loss” of his own “partial whiteness”—hitherto unquestioned access to a good education, well-paying jobs, freedom of movement, and other privileges. What do you think about this concept of race as contingent? How does it play out in the novel? How do you see it at work in your own life, your community, your country?

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