The Reluctant Fundamentalist- A Review

A novel I started after I returned from work and finished before I hit the bed. So, what was so compelling about this story that it made me finish the book in one stroke with occasional breaks for cooking dinner and consuming the cooked?
There were a couple of remarkable features about the author's style. I liked his narrative style, speaking to the reader on behalf of the stranger, his neatly etched out details of events in the cafe in Lahore and a gradual transition to a similar event in the larger, more promising city of New York. The open ended finish keeps the reader second guessing almost till the end.
The scenes where the author describes his conflicting feelings towards "his" country and "the other" country have been well brought out.
The love affair between the protagonist and Erica is at best passable, a mere detail that could have been done away with and would have had no difference to the narrative. The author displays a lot of emotion in his descriptions of his feelings towards Erica, but they seem not to leave any imprints on the minds of the reader.
It is indeed a tale of a man caught between two different realms. It is a reflection of what most people have been ranting in the wake of all the recent atrocities: We love our country, no we dont hate Americans, yes we hate American politics Oh yes, we definitely HATE WAR.