The Last White Man

At the beginning of Mohsin Hamid’s (Exit West) dreamlike new novel, a white man named Anders wakes to discover that his skin “has turned a deep, undeniable brown.” At first, Anders reveals the change only to his on-again, off-again lover Oona, but they soon discover that Anders is not the only white person to have changed. Anders and Oona grapple with their parents’ and their own reactions to the change, as the town descends into chaos around them, with some of the remaining white men forming militias and peddling conspiracy theories online. The author reads the novel, which is light on dialogue and full of looping, peripatetic sentences that reflect the characters’ inner thoughts and memories but leave the setting and specifics of the plot hazy. Hamid narrates with a measured tone that matches the sense of distance created by the prose.