This is the first Rumaan Alam book I have read. I heard about it during a presentation by the HarperCollins marketing team of their fall list. From their description, I expected it to be more about the conflict between the family renting the vacation house and the house’s owners, with the renters being white and the owners black. In fact, I found it to be more about family, and how quickly strangers can become family in a crisis. Or maybe that’s just the influence of reading the ARC during a pandemic. I don’t know if it’s good luck or bad to be publishing a post-apocalyptic book (or, really, a mid-apocalyptic one) during this time, but the difference between our information-heavy crisis and the characters’ utter lack of information is stark. The noise that sends them from vague fear into abject terror didn’t really land for me. To my mind, the horror wasn’t really ratcheted up until the kid’s teeth fell out. But the details of what was happening in the world didn’t matter as much as the details of what was happening in the house, which were handled expertly. I would absolutely recommend this to readers of Little Fires Everywhere, which is good because librarians can always use more Ng read-alikes.

This deeply human, near-apocalyptic novel by Rumaan Alam is one of those strange novels that manages to be extremely compelling but is not written at a break-neck pace. How do you react when tragedy strikes? How do you react when you are mildly inconvenienced? Can you just pretend to be a good person until you are? These deep, introspective questions are explored through the eyes of two families struggling to understand what is happening as the world around them falls silent. Humor and pathos walk hand-in-hand, as Rumaan looks at his characters with compassion while they go through trial after trial - some small, and some overwhelming large.

A fast read that will make you smile and leave you a little disturbed. Not to be missed!

Oh noooo!!!! This is smart, thrilling, riveting suspense and family drama but it’s not a great choice to read it during your quarantine and chill times because it’s claustrophobic, dark, suffocating, apocalyptic story.

Something going on outside and you gotta stay in your house to save yourself but maybe sometimes taking risk and leave the world behind, getting out of your shelter to see the things with your own eyes would be the best alternative!

The story terribly reminded me Jordan Peele’s “Us’: Family with two kids renting a vacation home and but another family appears at the door. Thankfully they are not their evil twins to come for replacing them like Us’ plot-line. This story is mostly psychology suspense, it is not a horror story!
It starts Amanda and Clay- a lovely couple wants to escape from their city life and rents a vacation home at the Hamptons for reasonable price as weekend getaway with their two kids. Everything starts quite relaxing, entertaining, peaceful like the silence before the storm or happiness before the approaching disaster as like all those thriller movies’ beginning.

Suddenly they hear the banging on the door and meet with G.H. and Ruth, house’s real owners escaped from NY because of blackout and came to their second home to use their shelter. The internet, television, cell service are shut down as a proof of their story. So they let them in. Of course the thought balloons start to appear above your head: are these people really the real owner of the house? What the hell is happening outside? Is this the apocalypse? How long to families need to stay together and do they trust each other? Should they do that?

High tension, family drama, class-race differences mixed with uncertainty of their situation and growing claustrophobia and feeling trapped in one location.

I could really give this book 5 stars because of great plot-line. But the perplexing language style, complex vocabulary choices and the way of story-telling were a little exhausting and complex for me. It broke my concentration at few times. Ending was okay but it could be more surprising and shocking. Those facts lowered my points to 3.5 but I still rounded them up to 4 because the promising premise and high tension story-building were delightful. It was still exciting, heart throbbing page-turner.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins Publishers/Ecco for sharing this ARC with me in exchange my honest review.

Wow! This book was so hard to put down! I’m honestly still a little upset that I reached the end and realized that there isn’t any more. I would have gladly read 100 or 200 pages more to find out what happens next. ⁣
Clay, Amanda, and their 2 teenage children book an Air BnB in the country for an much-needed vacation. All is well until there is a knock at the door in the middle of the night. Behind it is an elderly couple, the Washington’s, who claim they are the owners of the home, and they are seeking refuge from a citywide blackout in New York City. Clay and Amanda are unsure at first of the couple’s true intentions, and of their claims of disaster. But as certain strange events begin to plague the family, they start to wonder if there is any truth to the Washington’s claims. ⁣
I loved the author’s writing, from her detailed character descriptions to hinting at the horrors lurking behind the scenes. I felt like I was eavesdropping on conversations; each of the characters and their actions felt real. I could see myself acting like Amanda at times, for example. I shivered with anticipation each time a strange event occurred or was mentioned, and imagined it happening in real time and how I would react. ⁣
This is certainly an eerily timely book, what with the events of the world happening and how some are choosing to react to it. Do you prepare, or do you carry on as normal? What makes this book heightened in tension is not only the not knowing the true cause of the events outside, but the loss of the access to 24/7 news and information, and how both families choose to forge ahead with little information, each one believing they are in the right. It proposes a great discussion point: if you were in the same situation, would you choose to stay and wait it out, or would you leave and seek help elsewhere?

Something about Rumaan Alam’s writing style doesn’t jive with me - I felt the same with That Kind of Mother. Gave it a try though!

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

Archie was fifteen. He wore misshapen sneakers the size of bread loaves. There was a scent of milk about him, as there was to young babies, and beneath that, sweat and hormone. To mitigate all this Archie sprayed a chemical into the thatch under his arms, a smell unlike any in nature, a focus group’s consensus of the masculine ideal.

Thank you to Netgalley as well as the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. I was only able to get about 60 pages into this book and I struggled just to get that far so I was unable to finish it.

I was initially drawn to Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind by its unique premise. While vacationing in a rented home far more luxurious than their NYC apartment, a family encounters some unexpected guests late one night - the owners of the rental. They show up on the doorstep claiming that a blackout has struck the city and that they have retreated to their second home as a safety measure. What to believe? Should the vacationing couple trust these strangers? And is there really a disaster happening in New York City?

Lately, I have been rating books as five star reads if they capture my attention and keep drawing me back into the book, making me think about it even when I am not reading. Leave the World Behind is one such book. In this time of COVID-19 and Stay-at-Home orders, a book featuring the fun and warmth of a vacation in a beautiful, peaceful place is just what I needed. What is ironic is this story quickly turns into a book that is eerily similar to current events. This novel begs the question, do you shelter in place while on vacation when trouble comes knocking at your door or do you "leave the world behind?"

Leave the World Behind is a highly descriptive and engaging novel, which made it a really enjoyable read for me. I literally felt like I was on vacation with this family, taking in the sights and sounds, savoring delicious meals, and enjoying the ambiance of a beautiful vacation home. The book got even better when the Washingtons, the owners of the home, showed up on the doorstep, taking this novel from a light-hearted, fun read into something much more dark and sinister.

Recommended for a variety of readers, but especially those who love getting lost in what they are reading.

Leave the World Behind is a suspenseful, highly readable novel that takes place doing a black-out. A family from the city is renting a vacation home near the Hamptons when the owners got up late at night telling the family renting, there's a black-out in the city can they stay.. While it does not take place during the pandemic going on today, it's highly comparable and relatable. The writing is chrisp and the book is hard to put down. The characters are both likable and relatable. Will they be okay and what is going on in the world. Not sure if this is a spoiler, but I couldn't figure out why they never turned on the car radio..

Surprising, engaging, and frightening - a book about crisis well suited for our current times.

Each time I thought I knew where this book was going, it took another turn. I ended up reading it all in one sitting, but I'm sure I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

We begin with Amanda, Clay, and their two kids heading out to an isolated vacation home. With the night come two visitors - G.H. and Ruth, the house's owners, bearing news of an East Coast blackout. But there's no Internet or cell service to confirm their story - so they will just have to trust each other.

What follows is a character study of these individuals - how they interact and how they deal with the world around them, which suddenly looks very different than what they are used to. I recognized a lot of the emotions from COVID-19 quarantine in these people - selfishness mixed with understanding, despair and shock yielding to resolve. Alam draws his characters across race, class, and age lines, creating conflict and drama that bubble up throughout the pages.

I quite enjoyed the writing here as well - there's a good level of poetic description without veering into overwriting. I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy family drama and suspense.

Thank you to Ecco/HarperCollins for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I read this novel during quarantine for Covid-19, and while this book is not about a pandemic and quarantine, I found the storyline and the thoughts presented to be remarkably relevant to our current situation. Truly a novel that makes you think and that will stick with you.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358031

A family a summer vacation a lovely rental a wonderful family vacation.Barbecues the beach great family time.Then a knock on the door late at night.The husband answers it’s a couple they claim it’s their home they have a place in Manhattan but something happened that night they had to escape the city so they drove to their home knowing it was rented but they were desperate.
So this page turner a book that kept me up late takes off.A book with shocks surprises highly recommend.#netgalley#harpercollins

If you try to categorize this book, you will likely come. up short. Yes, literary fiction, yes, suspense/horror, yes, race, class, and money. All set in the remotest Hamptons-adjacent Air BNB in lieu of the usual cabin in the woods (btw that rental price was pretty good, I thought, for a week). Something has gone wrong, is going wrong, but no one knows what it is, because (duh, duh, duh) the phones, internet, landlines and tv are all out. Naturally, strangers come a-knocking at the door in the middle of the night.
Well, what transpires next is not what you expect. I have never hidden a review for spoilers previously on Goodreads, but I can't otherwise mention that this book reminded me quite a bit of Neville Shute's classic, "On the Beach."
Other thoughts: It's more compelling than enjoyable, and as they say, "you can't put it down."Readable in one day.

This novel had me at a blackout. An event that on a right (very wrong) scale can seem positively apocalyptic and a good apocalypse is fun to enjoy so long as it remains fictional. So that’s why I requested it on Netgalley, but then I forgot the plot summary by the time I went to read it. Often a good thing, but this time the novel had me seriously reconsidering selecting it for the first 11% or so, the three page grocery list alone was a perfect epitome of how much the writing didn’t work for me. It was objectively good. Detailed, psychologically clever and all that, but viscerally as unpleasant and unlikeable as the characters and (as the grocery list hints at) overreliant on the minutest of details. From the start you are introduced to a perfect vacation of a perfect stereotypically white Brooklynites, a well to do family, 2 parents, 2 teenage kids. They’ve rented a place in a remote area of Long Island, away from civilization and are all set to enjoy their family time, with all their food. So far…nothing interesting. And then in the middle of the night or at least too late to be polite, an older black couple shows up. The Washingtons. Turns out the Washingtons own the place and are even more well to do than their renters, thus defying so many cultural and racial stereotypes that are constantly cropping up in the narrative. Turns out there’s been a huge blackout in NYC and the Washingtons thought it would be safer to weather the event in the remote safety of their beach abode. Only now everyone has to share. An awkward situation, made all the more difficult by heightened emotions and fears. The author makes the most of it, but playing up the dramatics, race, class, financial brackets, the way they define reactions and experiences. The unnaturalness of the very concept of sharing when it really matters. And that’s about all one can talk about safely without giving too much away. Suffice it to say it’s a very bleak book and it succeeds at ratcheting up the claustrophobic bleakness until the very end. Genre wise it’s very much literary fiction, but psychologically it’s actually quite horrific and very effectively so. The writing style didn’t quite work for me, personally, the entire read was just viscerally unpleasant. Not because it was bleak and scary and claustrophobic, though are actually all good things in my books, just the way the author went about it. But like it or not, the quality is undeniable and easy to appreciate, objectively. This book has a lot to say, it does so against a striking setting and it exercises notable restraint, so it’s a pretty subtle nightmare. Not sure if that’s a recommendation or not, certainly more of an acquired taste sort of read. I’m the first to review this book on GR and I understand this isn’t the most enthusiastic of reviews, though I did strive for objectivity, it, of course, inevitably reflects a very personal reading experience. Much like it ought to. Thanks Netgalley.

Wow! What an incredibly creative premise for this novel! A family renting a vacation home receives a knock on the door, and it is the owners of the home who live full time in NYC. Something has happened, a blackout of some sort and feeling uneasy, they headed to a place they felt safe, their country home. This alone is genius! But things spin out of control., as something "BIG" has happened, but cut off from television, internet, and phone service, they have no idea what. This is a "can't put it down," "what in the world is going on" kind of novel. I loved reading this and devoured it in a day. However, I was not happy with the lack of a conclusion...or rather one only alluded to. Also, there is something strange with the way this novel is written. In general, it has a very straight forward style. But every so often, these SAT vocabulary words are thrown in that stick out like a sore thumb.. Here's a few examples: dishabillie, odalisques, vinyasa, geegaw, apparatchiks, connubial (more than once), etc. I read voraciously. I love coming upon a word I haven't seen before. But these were so out of place in this novel (and so frequent) that they became comical to me...and somewhat distracting. So much so I even discussed it with my husband! This is an ARC, so maybe the vocabulary will be cleaned up a bit before publication. In the end, this is worth a read even though in these days of quarantine, it is a bit unnerving. But be prepared for a bit of a let down in the end, and be prepared to have a dictionary at hand :) Thank you NetGalley and HarperCollins for providing a digital ARC for review.