The last man

After a lifetime spent between his birthplace of Lahore, Pakistan; the United States; and Great Britain, Mohsin Hamid is an expert at not only observing the world around him, but in using his surroundings to feed his art. In 1993, he was a relatively newly arrived transplant to the States and wrote his debut novel Moth Smoke about Pakistan. When he moved to London in 2000, he wrote about the New York City he'd recently left in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. And when he found himself back in his native Lahore, he began to conceive of the idea for The Last White Man, which he wouldn't sit down to write for many years.

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The book, which just hit shelves, imagines a world in which white people begin to turn dark-skinned — slowly at first, a few people waking up without their whiteness in disparate cities across the country, and then quickly, when suddenly entire communities are as similar on the outside as they've been on the inside. "I was thinking about the post-9/11 realization that, where before if you occupied a racial position that wasn't clearly white or Black, it was possible to go through life with only minor annoyances in terms of discrimination — but then afterwards, you'd be pulled into an interrogation room at the airport," he says. "And I was thinking about a world in which we realize that race is a fictional construct that we've willed into existence, but that doesn't actually exist on its own."