Exit West

Over the course of this novel, Nadia and Saeed go from being the inhabitants of a particular city and culture to being stateless citizens of the world. There is also a gathering sense in the novel that their situation is more common than not. At the beginning of the novel, the magical doors that transport them from their devastated city to a beach in Mykonos are relatively rare and hard to find. By the time that Nadia and Saeed are in London, however—surrounded by refugees not only from their unnamed country but from all over the world—the doors have become almost commonplace, to the point where British authorities even recognize them. These authorities ultimately decide not to bombard Saeed and Nadia’s community of squatters, both because it would be an inhumane action and because it would do nothing to change their new reality: “Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants […] Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open” (164).