This one took me a little while; I picked it up after my partner finished it sometime in 2021. The story follows Saeed and Nadia, a couple who meet while their country falls into a civil war. While Saeed and Nadia become closer, the conflict in their country worsens. They learn that people have been able to escape to other countries via doors that open to other places, all over the world. As fiction, these elements mark how Exit West engages with numerous contemporary subjects and themes. Imagining doors that can instantly transport people abstracts away some of the journey that actual immigrants and refugees make, but this story device helps highlight how a country’s borders are politically constructed. States can (and do) commit resources to constructing physical barriers to passage, but lacking wider coordination across economic and political blocks, these efforts are insufficient. Our world is globalized; our humanity is fluid; our lives are destined for exchange in innumerable forms (visible to us, or not). Exit West’s story feels like a recognition of this.