Genre Fiction
![Rumaan Alam - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B01BVWYWWM.jpg)
Leave the World Behind: A Novel
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?
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?
Editorial Reviews
"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)
"'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
"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
"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, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"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, author of Weather
"Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is the fall's biggest novel." -- Entertainment Weekly
"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
"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...
"'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
"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
"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, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"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, author of Weather
"Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is the fall's biggest novel." -- Entertainment Weekly
"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
"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...
Readers Top Reviews
J. Collins
Not an easy book to read during a worldwide pandemic. I literally consumed this book in two gulps...After starting it, I reluctantly had to go to sleep (as it was a work night) and started again once I finished my work day. It kind of reminded me of the book by Tom Perotta - The Leftovers. This book grabs you by the throat and holds on.
C.Murtagh
I never write reviews for books, I like reading them, not writing about them. If I could write well, I'd be a writer. Anyway, this book is incredible. I was hooked in from the start, and then every page just brought me further and further into a world which was a wonderful distraction from and at the same time a chilling parallel to the world outside. I actually for once really mean it when I say I couldn't put it down. An actual page-turner.
