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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 black 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.
Report
"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
"You should read this book because it makes your skin tingle, like stepping into a deep, dark pool of present-day anxieties." - The New Yorker
"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
"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)
"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
"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
"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, author of Such a Fun Age
"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, author of Hunger
"So clever and so subtle that it draws readers into a false sense of security and understanding.... Initially, the book seems to be about a modern marriage and family, priorities and choices, and how one measures success in the 21st century, and it is. But it is also much more.... Perfectly timed for today's uncertain world." - Library Journal
"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
