Excerpt from Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"It's not a problem." Amanda wasn't magnanimous. The call was a relief. She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.

Clay drummed fingers on the leather steering wheel, earning a sideways glance from his wife. He looked at the mirror to confirm that his children were still there, a habit forged in their infancy. The rhythm of their breath was steady. The phones worked on them like those bulbous flutes did on cobras.

None of them really saw the highway landscape. The brain abets the eye; eventually your expectations of a thing supersede the thing itself. Yellow-and-black pictographs, hillocks fading into prefab concrete walls, the occasional glimpse of split-level, railroad crossing, baseball diamond, aboveground pool. Amanda nodded when she took calls, not for the benefit of the person on the other end of the phone but to prove to herself that she was engaged. Sometimes, amid the head nodding, she forgot to listen.

"Jocelyn—" Amanda tried to find some wisdom. Jocelyn didn't need Amanda's input as much as she did her consent. Office hierarchy was arbitrary, like everything. "That's fine. I think that's wise. We're just on the expressway. You can call, don't worry about it. But service is spotty once we get farther out. I had this problem last summer, you remember?" She paused, and was embarrassed; why would her underling remember Amanda's previous year's vacation plans? "We're going farther out this year!" She made it into a joke. "But call, or email, of course, it's fine. Good luck."

From Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam. Copyright 2020 Rumaan Alam. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.