Its monologue recounts the experiences of Changez, a young Pakistani man who was educated and worked in the United States and how he comes to fall out of love with his adopted country after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
A novel about exile, the tensions between East and West and the conflicting pull of culture and national identity in shifting tones and style, it has been compared with the writings of Vladimir Nabokov and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Philip Pullman, famous for the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, described it as "beautifully written and superbly constructed" while Hamid himself has said it is the opposite of classic immigrant tales of America.
"It is more exciting than any thriller I've read for a long time, as well as being a subtle and elegant analysis of the state of our world today," Pullman said.
Much has been made of the fact that the bearded narrator tells his audience, an anonymous American stranger in a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan, that he smiles as he watches the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapse.
But whether Changez -- Urdu for Genghis, the Mongol conqueror who attacked the Muslim world -- is an extremist is just as unclear as whether his mysterious listener is a US spy.
Hamid, who holds dual British and Pakistani citizenship, has warned against reading too much into the novel for his own views or any parallels with his own life and attitudes. The temptation to read autobiography into the book is obvious: Hamid, 36, was born in Lahore and studied at Princeton university and Harvard Law School, before securing a job in the world of international finance.
He has also described how the published version of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" came into being at a time of conflict in his personal and professional life.
His departure from New York came just before "911" at a time when he felt a pull between staying in the United States or becoming a full-time writer in the full knowledge that it would strip him of his employment visa status.
He chose London as a half-way house, where he watched the twin towers fall with a mixture of fear and concern for former colleagues and friends he left behind as well as trepidation for what lay ahead.
The novel was redrafted to take into account the new reality of the perception and treatment of Muslims in the post-September 11 world in Europe and the United States.
In an interview with the International Herald Tribune published last weekend, Hamid said it is also about Muslim identity within the United States
and the wider world.
Asked if he considers himself a Pakistani Muslim or American, the British passport holder sums it up: "I'm fully neither. What I feel like depends on the context you put me in."
Elsewhere Hamid, whose first novel "Moth Smoke" came out in 2000, has said it is a call for greater understanding in a modern world where it is lacking between cultures and countries, underpinned by a knowledge of history.
"By taking readers inside a man who both loves and is angered by America and by allowing the readers to feel what that man feels I hope to show that the world is more complicated than politicians and newspapers usually making it seem.
"We need to stop being so confused by the fear we are fed; a shared humanity should unite us with people we are encouraged to think of as our enemies."

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2007