What did the early draft look like? What did you have to shed? What did you add after 9-11 to make the book the one we recognize today?

So when I finished my first novel, Mott Smoke, it was published in the early 2000.

I began working on another novel.

And at that point, I was living in New York and I was doing a corporate job in New York City.

And I wrote this novel that was like a quiet fable about a Pakistani man who's working in corporate New York, becomes disillusioned with his job, grows a beard, has a sort of doomed love affair, and moves back to Pakistan.

And I handed a draft of that novel into my agent in July, 2001.

And he was not very excited and didn't seem to love it and went away for a bit.

What made you decide that his silence was more powerful than anything he could say?

And now here's Mohsin Hamid reading Man-Eating Cats by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.

Man-Eating Cats.

I bought a newspaper at the harbor and came across an article about an old woman who had been eaten by cats.

She was 70 years old and lived alone in a small suburb of Athens, a quiet sort of life, just her and her three cats in a small one-room apartment.

One day, she suddenly keeled over face down on the sofa, a heart attack most likely.

Nobody knew how long it had taken for her to die after she collapsed.

The old woman didn't have any relatives or friends who visited her regularly, and it was a week before her body was discovered.

But none of this is explicit, [laughs] right? So writing in that simple language, how do you think Murakami manages to convey so much, or actually in a way to make us do the work of receiving it?

Now the next edition returns with new voices, new conversations and deeper journeys into the creative process.

I don't fundamentally experience the reluctant fundamentalist as a reader.