The Last White Man

“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”

Kafkaesque from its opening line, Hamid's novel feels simultaneously fantastical and familiar. In this world, everyone's white skin turns to dark, inevitably, though not all at once, and people react accordingly: confusion, denial, anxiety, conspiracy, violence. This beautiful book feels incredibly timely, with parallels to pandemic life and our nation's continued reckoning with the injustices of systemic racism. Through Anders and Oona, Hamid shows us, intimately, and with rather hypnotic prose, how people are transformed by experience, made different by context, not only as they transition from white to black but as their lives change in other, perhaps more predictable, ways.