Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West” was one of the most acclaimed novels of 2017. It was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times, among many other publications. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Former President Barack Obama included “Exit West” on his list of the best books he read in 2017.

Considering all that acclaim, it makes sense that “Exit West” was chosen earlier this year for the 2018 One Book, One Region in eastern Connecticut. One Book, One Region encourages people to read the same book, with goals of bringing people together to discuss ideas, broadening the appreciation of reading and breaking down barriers among people.

After months of programs and discussions, One Book, One Region culminates with Hamid coming to Connecticut College Wednesday for a talk that is open to the public.

“Exit West” focuses on a young couple who begin a relationship in an unnamed city, but that city soon erupts into a civil war. The couple decides to flee, which they do through mysterious doors that have the ability to transport people to other lands — in their case, first to Greece, then to London and San Francisco. They have to contend with the struggles faced by refugees.

Hamid is a world traveler himself. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he has spent chunks of time living there, America and England over the course of his life. He moved to the U.S. when he was 3 and his father was in a PhD program at Stanford. He was 9 when the family moved back to Pakistan. He came here for college, graduating from Princeton in 1993 and from Harvard Law School in 1997. He worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and then as a brand consultant, living in New York City and later in London. As he found success with his books, Hamid began writing full-time. (His other books include the international bestseller “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”) About nine years ago, he and his wife moved back to Pakistan, where they live with their two children.

The engaging Hamid recently spoke to The Day by phone from Pakistan, and what follows are some excerpts from that conversation.

On what sparked “Exit West”:

“When I moved back to Pakistan from London about nine years ago, I was struck by how many people sort of told me (he laughs ruefully) I made the wrong decision. My friends were kind of like, ‘Why did you come back? You’ve been away for 20 years.’ Everybody wants to leave. I had reasons for coming back, not the least of which is my wife and I wanted to be near our parents, who are getting older, and our siblings. But it got me thinking.

“The more I spent time here, the more I realized how this dream of leaving was widely held. But because I’d also spent a lot of time in America and Britain and those places, I knew that resentment and fear and, in some cases, even anger toward migrants or refugees was growing. I wanted to explore this because, as someone who has moved around my whole life, I guess I take a bit personally the rise in anti-migrant feeling. So that was bouncing around in my head for many years.

“One day, I imagine I was having a conversation just like this with somebody in America or Europe or somewhere far away, and I was speaking through my phone and my computer, and in the little rectangle of my screen on my mobile phone screen, I could see their face and they could see me. It was like this little magical portal, this window. It got me thinking that we carry these things around with us, these mobile phones that we can sort of go through in our consciousness, our imagination — video calls, phone calls. I started thinking what if we could actually go through rectangles like that, what if people could move as easily as they can communicate this way? That set into motion a whole jumble of thoughts, and the idea just wouldn’t let go. So I started writing, and the novel was born.”

More on what he was seeing in the world that prompted him to write about immigration and refugees:

“I guess I was feeling personally squeezed. When I was 3 years old, my father got into a PhD program in Stanford, California, and we moved from Pakistan to America … I was a little American Californian kid, you know, running around in moccasins and beaded vests in the 1970s in California. In 1980, we moved back to Pakistan. I was 9 years old … I lived in Pakistan until I was 18, and then returned to America. And this process would repeat itself two or three times, London for 10 years in the middle and now back in Pakistan for most of the last decade.

“Along the way, I have become a completely sort of mongrelized, mixed hybrid person. At the same time, I’ve come to feel that there is a kind of shrinking space for hybridized, mongrelized people. … You see all over the world, in a sense, this retreat into tribal identity, and the problem is for someone like myself who cuts across these identities and who feels it’s important to be able to span them. If we are being told, ‘You must take sides,’ it’s like watching a world where your parents are being divorced, your parents telling you that you can only speak to one of us ever again. …

“Navigating that is something my fiction has been partly dedicated to doing. ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist,’ my second novel, was about a Pakistani guy living in New York around the time of 9/11 who decides to go back to Pakistan, who decides he has to be one thing and not the other.

“But that choice that I wrote about in that book is the opposite of the choice I made in my own life, even though I live in Pakistan today, because I never decided I had to be one thing and not the other. I’ve always felt it’s important to try to be both things or multiple things because that’s who I am. When I see in the world today these trends playing out, the intensification of walls and borders and nativist sentiment, it deeply worries me. It sort of is a world where people like me don’t have much of a place but, at the same time, I think people like me should have a place. Also, I think that, in fact, most people are like me. Not everybody has the experience moving from one country to another, but everybody has the experience of moving from one generation to another, from being a generation of kids in their teens to being a generation of people in their 30s to being a generation of people in their 50s and 60s and then in their 80s. This is what is means to be a human being. This is a profound migration, and it makes migrants and mongrels out of all of us.

“I think, oddly enough, that I feel many of the older people who are most terrified of mixing and most terrified of borders being crossed are terrified migrants themselves because they’ve seen the country change and they’ve seen themselves become older ... In a way, it’s important to combat this anti-migrant sentiment with a degree of empathy and compassion for where it comes from. It’s natural that people become frightened or that they are alarmed. Then, when we, instead of reassuring them, tell them that all their fears are totally valid and in fact they should be even more afraid, you get the terrible results that we’re getting today.

“So I wanted to write a novel that was, in its own way, about the migration apocalypse but hopeful.”

On how he started writing:

“I had, I guess, a crazy imagination. When I was a little kid, I remember watching the ‘Star Wars’ films in California and writing my own galactic space opera at the age of 8, with stick figure illustrations of space ships blowing up and pretty terrible handwriting. When I moved back to Pakistan, just before I left, I’d encountered this game called Dungeons & Dragons. So I left with a Dungeons & Dragons set but no one to play with, and I hadn’t really played it. So I wasn’t even 100 percent sure how you DID play it with other people. I wound up reading it and playing it by myself, imagining these worlds of these characters, setting up things for the characters to go into. Without knowing it, I had come to do what novelists do, which is to create worlds, journeys for readers to enter into.

“Also, living in Pakistan in the 1980s, we had one TV channel, and once or twice a week, there’d be an American show, ‘Knight Rider’ or ‘Trapper John, M.D.,’ and I would wait all week for this show … The rest of what was on TV tended not to be of much interest to me, although there were some very good dramas and stuff that started coming on in the late ’80s. …

“So I got into books. I arrived at university, and I discovered at university that there were these classes you could take, creative writing classes, which were pass/fail, where all you had to do was write stories. I thought, ‘Well, this can’t be true! You write stories in class for pass/fail, and they count it like math or physics or economics.’ I took a couple of those, and I loved it. By the time I finished university, I knew that was what I wanted to do. And I was already working on my first novel at that time.”

When he was a senior at Princeton, Hamid applied to a fiction workshop. Legendary writer Toni Morrison taught the workshop and selected Hamid as one of the students for it. Hamid says Morrison was very supportive and helpful. And she offered a suggestion about reading one’s own writing out loud that Hamid still follows today:

“Among the things she used to do is she would read our work to us out loud. If you’ve heard Toni Morrison, this won’t surprise you, but … she is the most beautiful reader I know. She’s an incredible writer, one of the great writers of our time, but if anything, she’s an even better reader. She could read the back of a corn flakes box, and you’d be sighing and gasping. She made our work sound so beautiful. She said, ‘Look, you have to read this stuff out loud.’ And I did, ever since. A typical writing day for me — every hour I spend typing at my keyboard, there’s probably two hours I spend pacing around my study, with papers in my hand, reading them over and over and over again. Most of my writing, I guess, is just trying to write with my ears as much as I can.”

If you go

Who: Mohsin Hamid, author of “Exit West”

What: As part of the One Book, One Region initiative

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Palmer Auditorium, Connecticut College, New London

Cost: Free

Visit: onebookoneregion.org