In August 2022 we launched our Good Reading Book Post! We’re keen to share with all of you the first book we selected and why. Our August pick was The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid.

You can read some of our Book Post subscribers’ thoughts about the book on Facebook or Instagram.

WHAT WE THOUGHT

As soon as we started reading The Last White Man we knew we had found something wonderful. Sometimes the books that stay with you aren’t the ones you necessarily expect to and often it’s these that are the ones that you want to put into a friend’s hands while saying, ‘Trust me on this … it might be a little strange to start with but I want you to read it so we can talk about it!’

The Last White Man is THAT type of book. This is how it starts:

‘One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown. This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the colour of his forearm, subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him, male, darker, but this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible, and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not a separate person, just him.’

This is classic Mohsin Hamid: speculative, amusing and humorous but loaded with the promise of something real, current and hard that needs to be explored. Hamid likes to use magical realism to explore difficult social and political issues but his writing takes you into this strangeness so effortlessly that the fantastical feels completely plausible.

When Anders, a white man, wakes up to find his skin is brown, everything about it feels real. He calls in sick to work, hides in his hoodie and bunkers down in a state of semi-denial. The only person he feels comfortable telling at first is his old friend and sometimes lover Oona, who seems to take the news in her stride. But as the media start to report on more people around the world ‘changing’, the mood starts to shift. Oona feels the growing discontent of the community and violence starts to bubble up, militias form and vigilantism starts to take hold.

The Last White Man is a short book but perfectly formed. It packs a huge punch. It’s power creeps up on you and stays with you and the writing is tight and thoughtful, making it the perfect book to read in one sitting and then discuss with friends.