An electrifying and unnerving novel for our times, Leave the World Behind elegantly captures our age of anxiety and shows how the most terrifying situations are never far from reality
Rumaan Alam is the author of Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Stupendously good . . . Simply breathtaking, full of moments of
exquisite recognition, as terrifying and prescient as Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road . . . Leave the World Behind is an
extraordinary book, at once smart, gripping and hallucinatory . . .
When future generations (if that term doesn’t sound over-optimistic
at the moment) want to know what it was like to live through the
nightmare of 2020, this is the novel they’ll reach for
*Observer*
Would be resonant and terrifying even in a more normal year . . .
In his dazzling prose, his fascination with catastrophe and his
apparent ability to portend the future, Alam is a worthy descendant
of Don DeLillo . . . You will probably need to read it in as close
to one sitting as possible
*Sunday Times*
A sensation . . . A tense, atmospheric, splendidly written attempt
to grapple with impending doom … Even in its infancy, Leave the
World Behind was well poised to become the book of an era . . . A
striking, unsettling novel
*Independent*
Without any exaggeration, I can honestly say that I devoured Leave
the World Behind, in one greedy, uneasy gulp. It’s a taut
page-turner – one that starts out as a smart, knowing, contemporary
comedy of manners, but quickly spirals into an apocalyptic
nightmare so terrifyingly realistic that it sent shivers down my
spine
*Daily Telegraph*
For the reader, the invisible terror outside in Leave the World
Behind echoes the sense of disquiet today in a world convulsed by
the pandemic. There are intense parallels between the unreality of
life in the Long Island bolt-hole described in the book and
lockdown . . . The novel excels in its dissection of modern liberal
America and forces the reader to confront the limits of their own
heroism in the face of disaster
*Financial Times*
A book that could have been tailor-made for our times, with its
tale of racial tensions and an unnatural disaster . . . It’s a
close-up narrative, and its strength lies in the emotional pull . .
. There’s something for everyone: that is, to terrify everyone,
from parents to nature lovers to hypochondriacs
*The Times*
A page-turner, taking in themes of isolation, race and class . . .
As the author of a book about people trapped inside a house by a
huge event, desperate for information, Alam is a curious prophet .
. . Alam has an almost anthropological eye for the absurdities of
the upper-middle class, for the blindness of white people . . .
Leave the World Behind was influenced by Jordan Peele’s film Get
Out, apparent in Alam’s acuity on whiteness. But the closest
literary comparison could be Shirley Jackson, whose cold, detached
voice can be heard in Alam’s narrator when we are shown glimpses of
what is happening in the wider world
*Guardian*
Rumaan Alam creates an atmosphere of dread so convincing and
prescient that it stays with the reader long after reading . . .
Explores issues of race, class and identity in the face of
overwhelming disaster
*Irish Times*
Alam has built an apocalyptic thriller around a single concept:
what would you do if the world was crumbling around you? . . . This
novel is catching hold of its readers, and it’s easy to see why . .
. A bracing read. The story is crafted with a deft lightness of
touch and, at a mere 240 pages, it’s brisk and unfaltering. But
it’s the eeriness of the burgeoning apocalypse, and the paralytic
inability of the protagonists to help themselves, that will stay
with you the longest
*Irish Independent*
An exacting and dread-inducing story of suspicion, prejudice and
hysteria . . . It feels so entwined with the DNA of 2020, capturing
the hallucinatory quality which time takes on when stuck inside not
knowing what the future holds
*Esquire*
Once you read this topical and gripping novel, it’s all you’ll want
to talk about
*Stylist*
Rumaan Alam’s elegant novel presents a scenario familiar to many
readers of contemporary fiction in 2020: a mass power meltdown . .
. Alam controls the tension by almost imperceptible degrees . . . A
wonderful novel about the figurative walls we build to keep the
world outside
*Metro*
If the first half can turn a mirror on you, the second half will
shatter it . . . Undeniably haunting
*New York Times*
Poised to be one of the biggest titles of the fall . . . A comedy
of manners wrapped inside a tense disaster plot
*New York Magazine*
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 . . . A signature novel for this blasted year
*NPR*
Rarely have I encountered a book so cuttingly prescient about the
current emotional atmosphere . . . Alam’s deployment of creepy,
inexplicable detail is masterful . . . 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
*Vogue*
Alam has written a genuine literary thriller, one that is also a
disturbing window into our precarious age
*Independent*
The fall's biggest novel
*Entertainment Weekly*
Enthralling . . . Alam keeps close to his characters, who, like
insects in acrylic, remain trapped in a state of suspended unease.
This, he suggests, is the modern disaster – the precarity of
American life, which leaves us unsure, always, if things can get
worse . . . 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
*New Yorker*
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*
One of the eeriest, most disturbing stories I've read in some time
. . . The contours of everything might be recognisable, but what's
contained within is wholly deranged
*Refinery 29*
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 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*
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*
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, author of Give Me Your Hand*
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*
Here in your hands, wrapped in the delicious cloth of suspense,
Rumaan Alam 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, author of The Dark Dark*
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
*Laura Lippman, author of Lady in the Lake*
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