What's on my bedside table: Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Pakistan, where he grew up. He attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and worked for several years as a management consultant in New York and as a freelance journalist in Lahore. He now lives mainly in London, and he published his first novel, Moth Smoke, in 2000, His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was published in 2007, to great acclaim.

“I tend to read in the same place that I write, which is my bed. I read first thing in the morning and last thing at night before I go to sleep. At the moment, there are three books sitting on my bedside table:

Pereira Declares: A Testimony by Antonio Tabucchi

It’s a very short novel about a Portugese journalist who’s living in 1930s Portugal as Fascism descends, and he’s telling his testimony of how he comes, in bis own quiet way, to resist. It’s a lovely story; a love story between a man and his dead wife.; it’s a political drama and it’s a bit of a thriller as well.

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

The tale of a young man in Sudan who studied abroad, who meets another, older man who also studied abroad, and he comes to learn his secrets of the terrible things he did while studying in the West and the terrible ways he changed. This encounter between the Muslim world meeting the West over four decades ago was recommended to me by people who had read my novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and having read this book, I’ve come to learn a great deal.

Boys Will Be Boys by Sara Suleri Goodyear

This is a memoir about Sara Suleri Goodyear’s father, the famous Pakistani journalist, and she writes it as an academic at Yale, looking back on Pakistan’s history from the perspective of a daughter. Absolutely beautiful. ”