Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

Overview

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (Fiction)

A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher's Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe

A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.

From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped—and unexpected new ones are forged—in moments of crisis.

Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe.

Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other? 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062667656
Publisher:	Ecco Press
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,354
File size:	848 KB

About the Author

Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and the instant New York Times bestseller Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/13/2020

In Alam’s spectacular and ominous latest (after That Kind of Mother), a family’s idyllic summer retreat coincides with global catastrophe. Amanda and Clay, married white Brooklynites with two children, rent a secluded house in the Hamptons for a summer vacation. Their “illusion of ownership” is shattered when the house’s proprietors, G.H. and Ruth, an African American couple in their 60s, show up unannounced from New York City. Widespread blackouts have hit the East Coast, and G.H. and Ruth are seeking refuge in the beach house they’ve rented out. The returned owners are greeted with polite suspicion and simmering resentment: “It was torture, a home invasion without rape or guns,” thinks Amanda. G.H. and Ruth, in turn, can’t help but wish their renters gone (“G. H.’s familiar old fridge yielded nothing but surprise. He’d not have filled it with such things”). But over a couple days, they form an uneasy collective as a series of strange and increasingly menacing events herald cataclysmic change, from migrating herds of deer to the thunder of military jets roaring overhead. The omniscient narrator occasionally zooms out to provide snapshots of the wider chaotic world that are effective in their brevity. Though information is scarce, the signs of impending collapse—ecological and geopolitical—have been glaringly visible to the characters all along: “No one could plead ignorance that was not willful.” This illuminating social novel offers piercing commentary on race, class and the luxurious mirage of safety, adding up to an all-too-plausible apocalyptic vision. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

[I]mpossible to put the book down, to look away… Sometimes it takes a gifted storyteller to make us see what our imaginations cannot grasp. ‘Leave the World Behind’ tells us, with a heart-stopping insistence, that the time to fix what’s broken is now.

Los Angeles Times

Enthralling….  [Alam’s] achievement is to see that his genre’s traditional arc, which relies on the idea of aftermath, no longer makes sense. Today, disaster novels call for something different, a recognition that we won’t find a new normal.

The New Yorker

"You will want to read Leave the World Behind very quickly, you will want to read it very slowly and savor every word. Rumaan Alam's ingenious, gorgeously written novel feels both like a prophecy and a contemporaneous response to our anxious era, all of it building to a perfect finale.

Laura Lippman

"Prepare to sleep with the lights on."

Popsugar

Alam has a tremendous talent for bringing the complexities of family tensions to life. In the confined space of a single home, this remarkable novel takes on some of the hardest questions of our time about class, race, and who we become in moments of growing uncertainty. In every eloquent scene, Alam reveals something new about what being a family means in the twenty-first century.” 

Idra Novey

"The novel that looks to be the breakout hit of the fall, “Leave the World Behind” is a deeply unnerving, gorgeously written thriller."

NJ.com

In [Alam’s] writing is embodied both beauty and the horror of our daily existence. It’s an incredible gift, and one he uses to great effect throughout this novel…. Bearing witness to the range of emotions, the panic, the uncertainty and fear and doubt on a small scale, within this household, provides some comfort. There are no easy answers, but in the midst of uncertainty, we have each other to rely on.

Boston Globe

Alam crafts a delicious escape while also reflecting cultural issues beyond what we’re seeing in 2020…. Yes, reading a book about the world falling apart while the literal world falls apart feels meta, but Leave the World Behind is also a much-needed, delicious escape.

Shondaland

"'Leave the World Behind' is the perfect title for a book that opens with the promise of utopia and travels as far from that dream as our worst fears might take us. It is the rarest of books: a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit that deserves a place among the classics of dystopian literature."

Washington Post

Leave the World Behind isn’t only the novel of 2020, it’s so alive and intelligent and awake to the world we’ve built for ourselves, and over which we falsely believe we have control, that it feels more like one of the defining novels of our era.

Interview

If there’s one book that will haunt you in 2020, it’s this one….Equal parts literary fiction and suspense, Leave the World Behind is an unsettling, thought-provoking, and disturbing look at both the precarious state of world affairs as well as class and race relations. In a year when anything — including the apocalypse — feels possible, this novel offers a realistic glimpse of how the world as we know it could end, and it will leave you reeling.

Buzzfeed

I avoided Apocalypse Stories for Months. Then Leave the World Behind Became My Greatest Comfort. . . . I read the book in one sitting, and have thought of it every day since.

Time

"Alam brilliantly captures the shift in dynamics between the two families, from apprehension about each other to a collective front against an external entity. The narrative’s increasing tempo expertly dives into subtle yet incisive intersections between class and race, since the vacationers are white, and G. H. and Ruth are Black. Alam's novel lobs a series of unsettling questions: How will we react to the next nebulous horror? How will we parent? What will we define as home?"

Booklist (starred review)

Riveting and claustrophobic, Leave the World Behind invites us to sit with our discomfort and reflect on our own rushed judgments, delivering a dazzling and dark examination of family, race, class, and what matters most when the impossible becomes possible.

Esquire

"Leave the World Behind is so many things—funny, sharp, insightful about modernity and race and parenthood and home—but at its core it’s a story of our shared apocalypse; a steady look at humanity in the moment it tumbles from a great height. I have not been this profoundly unnerved by a science fiction novel since Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go."

Carmen Maria Machado

[Alam] is at the top of his game.... One of the eeriest, most disturbing stories I've read in some time.... Alam has not only brought his singular precision and subversive wit to his newest novel, but also has ventured into new, unhinged territory, where the contours of everything might be recognizable, but what's contained within is wholly deranged.

Refinery 29

“Leave the World Behind is an interesting type of apocalypse examination because it focuses on what happens to those removed from the action. Rather than fully examining the ramifications of this strange new world, it looks at the scars from the old world — race, class — that must be confronted in order for these characters to survive in the new . . . . Leaving the world behind is an illusion, just like a vacation is an illusion. Reality will catch up, and Alam’s novel examines what people do differently when it does.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Like Stephen King’s 1980 novella The Mist, Leave the World Behind expertly illustrates the horror of the unknown, the almost painful humanity we feel when facing down the end and, of course, human nature under duress. During an era of plague, racism, hatred, and division, this tale of a vacation gone awry is terrifyingly prescient.

Rolling Stone

[A] propulsive thriller…the book is both prescient and terrifying. Alam is an expert observer of the nuances of class and wealth, and the book is full of provocative, sensual detail, including one delicious page and a half where he lists every single thing his protagonist buys at the grocery store.”    

Vulture

Rarely have I encountered a book so cuttingly prescient about the current emotional atmosphere…Alam’s deployment of creepy, inexplicable detail is masterful….In some ways, the premise feels like the setup of any number of horror films, but Alam’s writing transcends that comparison, and the material with which he’s working is actually much more complex…This is a thrilling book—one that will speak to readers who have felt the terror of isolation in these recent, torturous months and one that will simultaneously, as great books do, lift them out of it. This book is going to be, as they say, big."

Vogue

The literary suspense of Leave the World Behind hinges on that familiar guilt-tinged longing for a vacation that never ends. . . . [Alam is] gifted with an acidic wit, one he uses to break down contemporary life at the cellular level. His wry observations about the structured chaos of vacation life might go on indefinitely — but then comes a knock at the door. . . . Undeniably haunting.

New York Times Book Review

“Leave the World Behind is pitch-perfect in atmosphere, easy to read and deceptive in the high polish of its setting. Alam has crafted a deeply bewitching and disquieting masterpiece."

Shelf Awareness

Perfectly paced, clever and haunting . . . This is one of those stories that inspires a hungry turn of pages, preceded by that desperate and lovely need to come up for air. So easily the best thing I’ve read all year.” 

Kiley Reid

In Leave the World Behind, readers wonder how Alam predicted our contemporary dystopian anxiety…. With lush details that sink under your skin, this is a novel whose confrontational impact lingers.

New York Observer

Here in your hands, wrapped in the delicious cloth of suspense, Leave the World Behind begs us to ask the most important questions. How do we let the other in? Where do we draw the borders of home? A prescient book, built for these strange times, sure to entrance and electrify.  

Samantha Hunt

"Leave The World Behind is that rarest of things, a beautifully written, emotionally resonant page-turner. Alam explores complex ideas about privilege and fate with miraculous wit and grace."

Jenny Offill

Rumaan Alam's witty, incisive take on the American privileged classes has always been hilarious, but there's a sinister shadow behind the satire in his latest book, as it becomes increasingly tense and unsettling. Alam has achieved a rare feat—a comic novel that is also genuinely terrifying.

Dan Chaon

This is an exceptional examination of race and class and what the world looks like when it’s ending—not at all different from the world we are in now.” 

Roxane Gay

"Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is the fall's biggest novel."

Entertainment Weekly

The best book you can read right now . . . A perfectly-engineered thrill ride that is also a novel of ideas, Leave the World Behind combines deft prose, a pitiless view of consumer culture and a few truly shocking moments. . . An exceptional read that will stay with you long after you’ve sped through its final pages.” 

USA Today

You’ll remember this book.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A suspenseful tale of race, class, and family ties during a time of crisis."

AV Club

A slippery and duplicitous marvel of a novel…. Leave the World Behind is atmospheric and prescient: Its rhythms of comedy alternating with shock and despair mimic so much of the rhythms of life right now. That's more than enough to make it a signature novel for this blasted year.

Fresh Air (NPR)

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind is a canny Trojan horse of a novel, and also a Pandora’s Box. Like the family at its center, we’re seduced utterly by the bounty and insularity of its world, only to find ourselves, inch by inch, approaching a larger darkness lurking just beyond. With a potent Shirley Jackson energy, it is both eerily timeless and sharply prescient at once, and lingers long after its final page.”

Megan Abbott

"This novel left me tense, overwhelmed, and bristling with admiration. Rumaan Alam is a brilliant writer, a beautiful prose stylist with an uncanny talent for drawing characters—both their individual quirks and foibles, and the subtle gradations of class and circumstance. In this novel he combines those gifts with absolutely superb pacing and atmospheric control, balancing the comic and the tragic, the real and the surreal, the cynical and the empathetic, the individual and the collective. I'm blown away by this novel."

Lydia Kiesling

"A white middle-class family rents an upscale home for a vacation. That’s one kind of novel. Then, an older Black couple arrives, saying they are the homeowners. Another kind of novel. Finally, the power goes out, and cellphone service disappears. Still another kind of novel. Alam (“That Kind of Mother”) doesn’t thicken the menacing plot; he changes it up so skillfully, you’ll lose your bearings just as the characters do."

Washington Post

"A suspenseful tale that examines the complexities of race and class."

USA Today

[I]mpossible to put the book down, to look away… Sometimes it takes a gifted storyteller to make us see what our imaginations cannot grasp. ‘Leave the World Behind’ tells us, with a heart-stopping insistence, that the time to fix what’s broken is now.

|Los Angeles Times

05/01/2020

Author of the popular novels Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother, Alam returns with an edgy work about a couple who leave New York City for some down time with their children at a rented house on Long Island. Then a man and a woman claiming to be the house's owners appear at the door, moaning that they have fled a major blackout in the city. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

★ 2020-06-17
An interrupted family vacation, unexpected visitors, a mysterious blackout—something is happening, and the world may never be the same.

On a reassuringly sunny summer day, Amanda, an account director in advertising; Clay, a college professor; and their children, Archie, 15, and Rose, 13, make their way from Brooklyn to a luxury home (swimming pool! hot tub! marble countertops!) in a remote area of Long Island they’ve rented for a family vacation. Shortly after they arrive, however, the family’s holiday is interrupted by a knock on the door: The house’s owners, a prosperous older black couple—George Washington and his wife, Ruth—have shown up unannounced because New York City has been plunged into a blackout and their Park Avenue high-rise apartment didn’t feel safe. Soon it becomes clear that the blackout is a symptom (or is it a cause?) of something larger—and nothing is safe. Has there been a nuclear or climate disaster, a war, a terrorist act, a bomb? Alam’s story unfolds like a dystopian fever dream cloaked in the trappings of a dream vacation: Why do hundreds of deer show up in the house’s well-maintained backyard or a flock of bright-pink flamingos frolic in the family pool and then fly away? What is the noise, loud enough to crack glass, that comes, without warning, once and then, later, repeatedly? Is it safer to go back to the city, to civilization, or to remain away, in a world apart? As they search for answers and adjust to what increasingly appears to be a confusing new normal, the two families—one black, one white; one older, one younger; one rich, one middle-class—are compelled to find community amid calamity, to come together to support each other and survive. As he did in his previous novels, Rich and Pretty (2016) and That Kind of Mother (2018), Alam shows an impressive facility for getting into his characters’ heads and an enviable empathy for their moral shortcomings, emotional limitations, and failures of imagination. The result is a riveting novel that thrums with suspense yet ultimately offers no easy answers—disappointing those who crave them even as it fittingly reflects our time.

Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam's novel is just in time for this moment.

Kirkus Reviews

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