A Year in Reading: Mohsin Hamid

I’d like to stand up and suggest Spilt Milk by Chico Buarque to any reader looking for some reading. The novel’s Portuguese title (which sounds gorgeously like what spilt milk looks like) is “Leite Derramado.” It’s under 200 long and yet crams in a century of Brazilian history, dozens of characters, formal inventiveness, tropical heat, racial tensions, old aristocrats, infidelity, drug violence, dramatic monologue, and a singer-songwriter’s mastery of oral cadence. It also oozes braininess and sex. If you aren’t intrigued, you’re a hard, hard soul. Ease up. Slip in.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His award-winning fiction has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and translated into over 30 languages. His essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications. Born in 1971 in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.