Alicia Upano was born and raised in Hawai‘i. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award Hawai‘i, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholarship. Her short fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, The Best Peace Fiction: A Social Justice Anthology, and more. After living in Asia and both U.S. continental coasts, she now resides on O‘ahu with her family.
Upano's debut novel is Everything to the Sea.
At Lit Hub the author tagged seven books that are "interested in romantic love as a process of transformation, not a terminus." One title on the list:
Mohsin Hamid, Exit WestRead about the other entries on the list.
This slim book is magical. Love blooms between Saeed and Nadia as civil war breaks out in their unnamed city. The stakes could not be higher, as Hamid writes as thenovel opens, “[O]ne moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying.” In such a landscape, what are young lovers to do?
Exit West explores the tension between duty and independence, desire and convention, and how to move forward when the present is untenable. Our young lovers must leave their families and country, fleeing through the first of many doors as refugees. This novel highlights the refugee crisis, with sharp interstitials of global violence, while also grappling with the questions of any relationship that is no longer new: How do we change through every door we pass through? Have we passed through so many doors that we are no longer the people we were? Can we continue this journey together? And will you remember me, no matter how this journey ends?
Exit West is among Andrew Forrester's ten love stories for the romance reluctant, Forbes's thirty greatest dystopian books of all time, Ore Agbaje-Williams's seven top books featuring very complicated friendships, Gian Sardar's eight of the best novels about war-torn love, C Pam Zhang's top ten novels about moving and Helen Phillips's six notable novels involving alternate realities.
--Marshal Zeringue
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