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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2020, 256 pages
Paperback:
Nov 2021, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Callum McLaughlin
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A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
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?
Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam's third novel is 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.
1
WELL, THE SUN WAS SHINING. THEY FELT THAT BODED WELL—
people turn any old thing into an omen. It was all just to say no clouds were to be seen. The sun where the sun always was. The sun persistent and indifferent.
Roads merged into one another. The traffic congealed. Their gray car was a bell jar, a microclimate: air-conditioning, the funk of adolescence (sweat, feet, sebum), Amanda's French shampoo, the rustle of debris, for there always was that. The car was Clay's domain, and he was lax enough that it accrued the talus of oats from granola bars bought in bulk, the unexplained tube sock, a subscription insert from the New Yorker, a twisted tissue, ossified with snot, that wisp of white plastic peeled from the back of a Band-Aid who knew when. Kids were always needing a Band-Aid, pink skin splitting like summer fruit.
The sunlight on their arms was reassuring. The windows were tinted with a protectant to keep cancer at bay. There was news of an intensifying hurricane ...
By positioning his characters on the periphery of disaster, Alam is able to tap into the paranoia, denial, speculation and even the enduring boredom of domesticity that remain when society is on the brink of crumbling. It also makes clear that the point of the novel is not to try and understand "what's going on," but rather to observe the various ways each character responds to fear itself. Leave the World Behind begs to be debated, making it an ideal book club pick you'll be urging everyone to read...continued
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(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
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. Jenny Offill, author of Weather
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. Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
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. Megan Abbott, author of Give Me Your Hand
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.With his novel Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam explores how a group of isolated strangers react to an unspecified threat that is sweeping across New York. By hinting at the disaster's cause and effect, but depriving both his characters and his readers of concrete answers, he is able to tap into our inherent fear of the unknown.
Though wholly original in tone and execution, the book is not the first to dip into the dystopian genre without providing wider context, using an apocalyptic setup as a springboard to explore the human response to fear itself. Here are a few other novels that take this same core notion in entirely different but equally fascinating directions.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
First ...
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