Name: The Last White Man
Rating: 3.375 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9789354927027

Mohsin Hamid

One morning, Anders wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land. Some see in the transformations the long-dreaded overturning of an established order, to be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders's father and Oona's mother, a sense of profound loss wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance to see one another, face to face, anew.

The Last White Man

Pia 

You're so beautiful" her mother said as she was leaving. "You should get a gun."

“Gorgeously crafted, morally authoritative, The Last White Man concludes on a note of hope, a door jarred open just enough to let transcendence pour through, literature’s mission incarnate.” –O, the Oprah Magazine From the New York Times bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change One morning, Anders wakes to find that his skin has turned dark, his reflection a stranger to him. At first he tells only Oona, an old friend, newly a lover. Soon, reports of similar occurrences surface across the land. Some see in the transformations the long-dreaded overturning of an established order, to be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance to see one another, face to face, anew. In Hamid’s “lyrical and urgent” prose (O Magazine), The Last White Man invites us to envision a future – our future – that dares to reimagine who we think we are, and how we might yet be together.

A Novel

Eva Ströberg

The last white man - Mohsin Hamid
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⭐️⭐️⭐️
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What happened if you wake up in the morning and found out that your skin has changed from white to brown? And it also happened to many people in town? Well it created chaos for a start. Riots, people could no longer trust each other. And people who changed could suddenly relate how it felt to be brown, to be overseen, to be invisible, to be underestimated.
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Hamid’s work is excellent imho, and as a “brown” person, I could relate. So many symbolism in the book, yet I feel like he was merelty scratching the surface. Unfortunately, the fate of Anders, the white guy who turned brown, wasn’t as dramatic as I thought it would be. Or was it Hamid’s hidden message that there are still good in this world, despite the prevalent racism everywhere? 
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#mohsinhamid #thelastwhiteman #britishauthor #bookstagram #2023readingchallenge #2023reads #currentlyreading

Shona Tiger

This first appeared in The Sunday Long Read, August 14, 2022 — Issue #354.

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

With that opening line, Hamid introduces us to Anders, and to a town where, inexplicably, people have begun to turn brown. The rest of the plot is very light (mild spoilers): Anders has a girlfriend, Oona, who must process his abrupt transformation. Anders’s father is slowly, and then quite suddenly, dying: will that be more important, in the end, than what is happening to Anders? Oona’s mother, who spends a lot of time online, on certain sites, has only ever seen the world one way; will she be able to adjust to this new reality, or fall apart? 

I was reminded immediately, on beginning this book, of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass, where the protagonist wakes up white. Here are the first few lines from Blackass:

“Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep. He was lying nude in bed, and when he raised his head a fraction he could see his alabaster belly, and his pale legs beyond, covered with fuzz that glinted bronze in the cold daylight pouring in through the open window. He sat up with a sudden motion that swilled the panic in his stomach and spilled his hands into his lap. He stared at his hands, the pink life lines in his palms, the shellfish-coloured cuticles, the network of blue veins that ran from knuckle to wrist, more veins than he had ever noticed before. His hands were not black but white … same as his legs, his belly, all of him.”


Blackass is a great book to pair with Hamid’s: the approaches are very different, with Hamid’s being a lot more literary, and Barrett’s rather comic—but both books raise the question of race in an interesting way.

While I did not find it the most compelling book, The Last White Man is nevertheless a very quick and interesting read—I got through it in a few hours—and I recommend it.

My rating: 7/10.

The Last White Man

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