The Last White Man: A Novel (Large Print / Paperback)

Staff Reviews

Race may be a construct, but its implications are very real, and Mohsin Hamid asks us to consider this in his novel The Last White Man, which takes us into the heart of ‘whiteness’ and the collective imagination that gives power to that whiteness. It’s a simple premise with profound ramifications --one morning (in a nod to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis) Anders, a white man, wakes up to find he has turned into a brown man. In a short intro to the novel, Hamid asks us to “destabilize the collective imaginings we inherit,” to imagine a future where we shed our inherited biases and “do not cling monstrously to nostalgias for the past.” And besides being a powerful allegory about race, The Last White Man is also a tale of profound love and profound loss, about family love and family bonds, about the roles we play, both societal and familial—son, daughter, father, mother, about the many versions of ourselves and the selves we grow into. I loved the book’s fluid style, with its paragraph-long, comma-filled sentences that are a very effective, impressionistic way to convey the novel’s ideas and feelings about race and the intimate space of family. Ed loved and highly recommends!