Meeting the book club, Mohsin Hamid was keen to clear up certain common misunderstandings of his Booker-nominated novel. Foremost is the assumption that the Reluctant Fundamentalist of the title must be of the religious variety.
In fact, his central character Changez has been working as a financial analyst for a Wall Street company analysing businesses for their investment "fundamentals" – and it is his reluctance to embrace this rapacious perspective that pushes him into the orbit of the more familiar kind of fundamentalist.
Other aspects of the novel that readers are unclear about he had left deliberately opaque, including the ending. Who is Changez's interlocutor? And is he about to be killed? These questions, Hamid said, are left for the reader to work out in a way that holds a mirror up to their assumptions and expectations.
