The writing of the first draft of Mohsin Hamid’s debut novel,
Moth Smoke(2000), was supervised by Toni Morrison while Hamid was studying at Princeton University in New Jersey, USA, in the early 1990s. He finished the novel while working for a management consultancy company in New York. It went on to win a Betty Trask Award and reached the finals of the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Moth Smoke is set in Lahore during the summer of 1998, the year Pakistan tested its nuclear bomb. The economic reverberations of the nuclear tests were severe, as America acted swiftly to rescind its aid programme to Pakistan. Hamid accordingly focuses on the disintegration of the comfortable life of Daru, a man in his late twenties. This decline is sparked when Daru loses his job in a bank for being rude to a wealthy
2970 words
Citation: Chambers, Claire. "Moth Smoke". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 July 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23136, accessed 23 November 2024.]
