"The Reluctant Fundamentalist", which was in the running for the prestigious Booker Prize Tuesday, is Mohsin Hamid's second novel and treats some of the most pressing issues of the early 21st century.
Its monologue recounts the experiences of Changez, a young Pakistani man who was educated and worked in the United States and how he comes to fall out of love with his adopted country after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
A novel about exile, the tensions between East and West and the conflicting pull of culture and national identity in shifting tones and style, it has been compared with the writings of Vladimir Nabokov and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Philip Pullman, famous for the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, described it as "beautifully written and superbly constructed" while Hamid himself has said it is the opposite of classic immigrant tales of America. "It is more exciting than any thriller I've read for a long time, as well as being a subtle and elegant analysis of the state of our world today," Pullman said.
Much has been made of the fact that the bearded narrator tells his audience, an anonymous American stranger in a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan, that he smiles as he watches the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapse.
But whether Changez - Urdu for Genghis, the Mongol conqueror who attacked the Muslim world - is an extremist is just as unclear as whether his mysterious listener is a US spy.
Hamid, who holds dual British and Pakistani citizenship, has warned against reading too much into the novel for his own views or any parallels with his own life and attitudes. The temptation to read autobiography into the book is obvious: Hamid, 36, was born in Lahore and studied at Princeton university and Harvard Law School, before securing a job in the world of international finance.
He has also described how the published version of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" came into being at a time of conflict in his personal and professional life.