This story begins when a middle class family from Brooklyn, Clay, Amanda, and their two teenaged children are at the beginning of their vacation in a luxurious rental home on Long Island. They plan to enjoy a typical relaxing vacation that is to include among other things swimming, eating, and for the adults, time to unwind without work and to enjoy some alcoholic drinks.

On their second night at the house, there is a surprisingly late knock on the door. When Clay and Amanda answer, they see an older black couple, GH and Rose, who claim to be the owners of the house. GH and Rose have fled the city of New York because there has been a sudden and unexplained blackout. Due to the unusual situation, they arrive in a state of alarm, and GH and Rose hope to find that all is well at their Long Island home. Surprisingly, there is electric service but there is no internet, no television or radio and no cell phone service.

The two families who are at first cautious of one another eventually find themselves bonding because they really don’t know or understand what is happening around them. With each new day, more and more curiosities and uncertainties emerge. Any newly perplexing or fantastic event that occurs brings with it some distress, tension, and horror that serves to progress the uncanny plot.

The book is filled with tension and family drama. Its plot tugs at the emotions of the reader who becomes entrenched in the surreal and claustrophobic nature of the book’s world. It is a book about how people react in a crisis. It brings up questions about what becomes important in a crisis and about who and/or what are the priorities in such unusual situations. And it chronicles the psychological conundrum that comes with a problem that has no realistic solution.

The omniscient narrator changes focus frequently as the landscape of the events changes. The author offers a narrative filled with descriptive details, and that, along with the perfect setting contribute to the surreal tone of the story. And finally, because the book promotes an impending and progressively intense feeling of doom, isolation, and fear, it is up to the reader to suspend reality and normalcy in order to bring the story to its fruition. Leave the World Behind is for those who enjoy an ending that is compellingly uncomfortable and concludes with countless loose ends as well as many unanswered questions.

This review is written from the egalley of the book courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley.

When we think about the end of the world, we tend to think big. We think of the apocalypse on a global scale, and understandably so. However, while the end may be large, the way in which we experience might be anything but.

Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” offers a smaller, more intimate look at the end. Through the lens of two families – largely strangers to one another – the reader is offered a glimpse at the way in which our perceptions of the world are based on a shared reality … and what happens when that shared reality is shattered in ways we don’t and can’t possibly know.

It is a thoughtful and propulsive read, a story that draws you in and asks – nay, demands – to be compulsively consumed. This is not a book about the world bearing witness to its own end, but rather about what it means to not know, to not understand, even as our faith in our world’s permanence is irrevocably and rightly shaken apart.

Amanda and Clay are an upwardly-mobile middle-class couple from New York City. She’s in advertising, he’s a professor. They have two kids – a teenage son named Archie and a tween daughter named Rose – and a pretty decent life. They’re making their way to an isolated spot on Long Island, a week-long vacation rental where they can escape the city and spend some time living the high life in this luxurious rental property.

The trip starts out just as they expect – a beautifully appointed house with a pool and a hot tub, high-speed internet and satellite TV, cabinets filled with hot dogs and ice cream and other vacation-type foodstuffs. The kids are even getting along. Life is good.

Until it isn’t.

Everything about this vacation changes with a single late-night knock on the door. G.H. and Ruth – the house’s owners – show up unexpectedly with some disturbing news. It turns out that New York City is utterly without power courtesy of a sudden and unexplained blackout. At the house – which still thankfully has electricity – there is no internet or television service. The cell phone signal-less isolation – so appealing just a day before – now feels ominous and frightening.

None of them knows what is happening … and none of them know how to find out.

With little choice, the two families become one. These people – essentially strangers – are forced to decide whether or not to trust one another as they wait to receive word from the world beyond this isolated bubble. Are they safe here? Are they safe anywhere? As time passes, there are a few scattered indications that something big has happened – something that may have truly massive repercussions – but there’s no way of knowing what is going on … or what the future might hold.

Alam pulls a marvelous bit of literary sleight-of-hand here. We spend the first part of the book engaged in what is almost a dramedy of manners, a deconstruction of various flavors of middle-aged angst that rings familiar to any consumer of literary fiction. We even get a racial dynamic – Amanda and Clay are white, G.H. and Ruth black – that lends a tinge of cultural complexity to the situation.

Then, the author flips the script, dropping these two families into the midst of an unclear crisis. They have no way of knowing what is actually happening (though Alam weaves in just enough third-person omniscient details to give us a sense, albeit a vague and far from complete one, of the circumstances), and so are left to deal with one another as well as they can. All of them can feel that SOMETHING is happening, but without clarification or confirmation, they simply … carry on.

While the delicate narrative gymnastics are impressive enough, there’s even more to the experience of “Leave the World Behind.” Alam has a deft confidence with regard to his characters, rendering them as full and complex individuals with a quickly-sketched ease. All of them spring from the page in a matter of a few sentences, fully-formed, flaws and all. That rapidity opens the door for both narrative acceleration and thematic exploration; we know who these people are immediately, their beliefs and biases laid out for us all to see.

Then, of course, there’s the weaponized ambiguity that Alam wields throughout. Without it, we wouldn’t get the sense of creeping dread and fear and paranoia lurking just beneath the surface of it all. And ultimately, it becomes clear that not only do they not know what’s happening, they will NEVER know – for them, at least, the mystery will never be truly solved.

Too often, literature allows itself to be bound by convention and tropes. Rumaan Alam takes a different approach with “Leave the World Behind,” choosing instead to give us a blending and bending of ideas, moving in one direction before pivoting to another and blurring the lines between them, setting the compass needle to spinning and rewriting the lines on the map to create something quite different from what you’ve experienced before. Loud or quiet, large or small – every ending is its own.

Such beautiful writing and suspense building but this book was... not for me. This is not a criticism of the author; I found his way with words to be inviting and mesmerizing. Every book has an audience, and I was just not the right reader.

I interviewed Rumaan for the cover of the November/December 2020 issue of Poets & Writers. As I wrote in that review, I found it to be a riveting, timely thriller, reminiscent of the movie Get Out, with its smart layering of race and class with the urgency of external threats, usually brought on by ignorance. I was particularly taken with the role of children as our saviors/saving grace in the book and the ways that Rumaan inserts some of his parental anxieties and quirks into the book via his characters.

“ Comfort and safety are an illusion.” If ever there was a motto for 2020, Alam has nailed it. “ Leave the World Behind” has a simple premise: upper middle class professional family with 2 teenagers leaves Brooklyn for a summer vacation in the woods on Long Island. Their AirBnB is a gorgeous home with pool and hot tub, a short drive from the ocean. But their world will be changed in an instant. Alam is probably the best author I had never heard of. I’ll be looking for his other books ASAP, because I can’t stop thinking about the effect this novel had on me. His writing is crisp and clear with descriptions that put you immediately into the minds of his characters. I understand that some readers won’t like these characters and will find them shallow, but I’ve never let that stop me from enjoying a well told story. Unputdownable doesn’t begin to describe this book. It will haunt you because it’s brilliant! Highly recommended. And that grocery list that many readers complain of is extremely revealing. It made me read my own grocery list and laugh at the comparison.
Read this book!

In a world of information overload, this story explores our vulnerability when the electronic devices we've come to rely on suddenly, inexplicably cease to function. A family on a rural vacation gets marooned from the rest of the world when their cell phones and televisions mysteriously stop receiving signal. When unexpected visitors subsequently show up on the doorstep of their vacation rental home late in the night, there is no way to confirm or deny the story they bring with them and although it's apparent the vacation is over, there's no way to know if they can go home.

This was a real page-turner; a thought provoking thriller about how the tether of technology provides us with a precarious sense of freedom.

My looming anxiety was super intrigued on where this book was taking me. A white family in an isolated rented vacation home. The home’s Black owners knocking on the door in the middle of the night needing a place to stay. Was it thriller? Was it contemporary literature? Was it an exploration of race and class? I’m still not totally sure but definitely enjoyed the journey.⁣

Thank you to both Netgalley and Ecco Books for the e-galley of this book.

When I read the plot description for “Leave The World Behind” I wasn’t sure if this was a book I would want to read during these scary and uncertain times. But I’d heard so many good things about it that I decided to give it a shot and I’m glad I did. There have been many excellent summations of the plot in other reviews, so I won’t add mine. Rather I will mention how profoundly I was struck by Alam’s powerful examination of so many timely issues in a relatively short (230 pages) book. From his exploration of the effects of race and class, the precariousness of our current lives, and the awareness that while we have high ideals we all too easily slip into ingrained stereotypical thinking. Just as remarkable is Alam’s exceptional writing style, perfect pacing, outstanding character development, and the build-up of an increasing sense of menace. While this might not be a book for everyone during our current harrowing times, it is one I recommend.

My review was posted on Goodreads on 10/26/20.

Couldn't stop reading this until very late, seeking plot resolution and exposition/explanation. Think of a treatment for a lesser late-season Black Mirror episode or straight-to-Netflix drama: a thriller setup with literary pretensions, building suspense through ambient anxiety with six people trapped together in a high-end Long Island AirBnB. Works best at illustrating the gradual descent of wealthy entitled New Yorkers into an (admirably) under-explained apocalypse that has ended technological civilization, something involving hurricanes, loud booming sounds, and unexplained weaponry, as we learn from sporadic and brief changes in scenery.

But ultimately this was a shallow mood piece about ambient dread, which was mundanely anchored in the material details of everyday life-- like an endless high-end supermarket shopping scene and detailed pasta recipes-- and the outward markers of wealth and status. This was too taken with its own cleverness to bother to make any emotional connection with the reader or the characters: sarcastic but not satirical in tone, harshly judgmental but not especially illuminating of character. Alaam drips with condescension for Clay and Amanda, 40-something upper-middle-class white Brooklynites whose implicit racism is inflamed, and whose incapacity to manag reality, are undeserving of empathy or pity. Even thinner and more objectionable was his characterization of G.H. and Ruth, a Black couple in their 60s, who are racial stereotypes straight out of 1990s network TV: wise elders there to solve white people's problems (G.H. is even told he looks just like Denzel Washington)...

Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Collins for sending me an ARC in return for an honest review.

Its no surprise that Leave the World Behind has instantly captivated its readers. This gripping read will have you turning pages late into the night. Cuddle up with a warm blanket, its going to be a wild ride.

While headed out on vacation, Amanda and Clay have a dream of what this trip will entail including quality time with their teens, which doesn't happen often. But a late-night knock on the door changes course and turns the family vacation upside down.

I’ve seen a lot of chatter about Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam’s third book, and I’m here to say I LOVED it! It’s not an easy book to describe because throughout it not even the characters are quite sure what’s happening, but something is off. Clay and Amanda and their two teens have rented a lovely, remote country home for the week. Late on their second night there, a knock at the door brings an older Black couple they’ve never met before. G.H and Rose, the owners of the home. They’ve arrived claiming “something” happened in NYC causing a total blackout. The couple is clearly shaken and eventually Clay and Amanda agree to let them stay the night. Things get stranger as cell service, internet and cable are all out.

Tension abounds in Leave the World Behind not only because no one knows what is really going on, but being in close quarters under trying circumstances forces the characters to look at themselves more closely. Issues of race, class, and traditional roles intersect with bizarre events and growing uncertainty. This book is hard to classify. It’s a little bit dystopian, a little bit mystery, and a lot social commentary, but in a completely unique way. I really liked all the characters, the ways they interacted with each other, and faced down their own flaws. This won’t be a book for everyone. The ending is not neat and tidy, but I loved how humanity shown in Leave the World Behind as the two couples were forced to not only work together, but to really SEE each other.

Note: I received a copies of this book from Ecco in print and electronically (via NetGalley) in exchange for my honest review.

What in the world did I just read? If you enjoy dystopian novels, mysteries, you might enjoy this one. I absolutely did not. Amanda and Clay are heading to a vacation rental with their two teenage kids. None of the characters are attaching. Amanda is obsessed with sex, Clay is obsessed with smoking. You pay close attention to any hint thrown at you as you believe this will help you understand what is going to happen next.

I will no share my conclusions as I do not want to spoil the story for you. Well, at least, there is a conclusion IMHO.

I gave it a 2 stars instead of one because I enjoyed the symbolism and the constant questioning. The author did a good job keeping us on our toes, forcing us to ask ourselves questions.

Thank you Net Galley and Ecco for this e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC copy . I enjoyed the creepiness and slow build up of fear - but it was perhaps a bit too slow. I wish more time had been spent on the actual event, what happened in the city and afterwards. Though maybe that is the point - my imagination is coming up with all sorts of possibilities.

This deeply unsettling book is perfect for any reader who is leaning into disaster lit during the pandemic. If your anxiety is high–skip it for now. I fall somewhere in between; plenty of anxiety, but I couldn’t look away from this book. The tension, language, and interweaving of race and class commentary are subtle and masterful.

I was struck at the start of this book (and even more so at the end) at how much this was a novel that wanted to be a play. First of all, there are the characters who are almost three-dimensional but lacked that final, life-giving varnish (the kind of varnish that, say, an actor could have brought), and secondly because 95% of this book is tedious, repetitive dialogue that's clearly meant to be loaded with meaning (just like most of the exposition! but we'll get to that later) and the narrative takes every. single. possible. opportunity to dodge an attempt at significant action. I care less that we don't know what happened here than that the characters didn't even really try to figure it out, that every foray into the outside world was ended by some sort of internal crisis or - again - overly loaded interaction with some random. (It was almost as if the narrative was required by some external force to be restricted to a certain set of scenery, almost like, you know, it had been set on a stage with only a certain number of backdrops.) I understand that not every end of the world book can deliver the detail and horror The Stand does (and, hell, even King doesn't get into the "why," really, and that's a 1000 page book) but this book didn't even try. No, but I guess it's better to have instead ten thousand generalities about parenthood/humanity/modern life masquerading as insight than to attempt the (much more difficult) work of detailing the end times. (Sorry, but those little asides sprinkled in don't cut it for me. More work/space went into the grocery lists and the description of the interior of the mansion, which is...irritating.)

But let's talk a little bit more about those generalities ("parenthood is like x." "children have better instincts." "modern life is so joyless." etc etc etc) and how completely frustrating they were to read. I feel like they were meant to lend the book an air of authority, but for me they just served to constantly undercut the action (what there was of it). And so many of these asides had such a strange, smug, almost holier-than-thou tone to them that it was at times difficult not to roll my eyes at them, particularly when they were stacked (as they tended to be near the end of the book) cheek by jowl, paragraph after paragraph. Some of that is due to Alam's decision to switch, at random, between the characters' POVs, which is an authorial decision I almost always hate. Here, like so many other decisions, it serves only to blunt the action and create a kind of echo chamber: here's a generalization about parenthood from this angle, now from this one, oh, look, let's let the kids weigh in. This also left me feeling like parenthood, really, was the topic Alam was more interested in and that, you know, maybe that should have been the stated focus of the book instead. Drop the whole end of the world thing, just do a bottle episode of the family on vacation. At least then you would know from the jump what you were getting.

All of the above would have likely bothered me even if the topic had been different, but here, when there could have been many more interesting things to examine, this book left me feeling so incredibly aggravated. It throws out SO MANY pithy asides, that it ends up saying very little, really. Definitely not for me.

Taking a vacation to get away from hectic life in New York, Amanda, Clay and their two children arrive at a rental house a sleepy little corner of Long Island corner of Long Island. When the owners of the house show up at the house late one night fleeing the chaos brought about by a blackout that has crippled the city, the couple has little choice but to let them in.

Unfamiliar with the area, fining themselves with no TV or cell service, Amanda and Clay aren’t sure who to trust or what exactly is happening. They are forced to share the house with the couple that owns it while both families try to find answers.

The description lead me to think this would be more of a thriller that it actually was.

Issues of family and age and race were well written, showing the awkwardness and the stumbling toward understanding. The writing style was at times beautifully descriptive and engaging and at others off-putting.
The plot never really came together in a satisfying way for me and the ending left so very many unanswered questions.

This book was insanely good!! A book that I couldn't stop talking about with anyone who would listen. I compared notes with other readers and kept reading new meaning into the story. I will say that the description makes the book out to be more of a thriller/a faster paced read. It's actually much more of a slow burn, very literary fiction, and will leave you with tons of questions. I would recommend to basically anyone, I think it was a super timely read and will leave an important mark.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. It was beautifully written and incredibly unsettling, but so good! Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2D7F1WUGWIFXR/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

GREAT book: no spoilers
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2020
I didn't read any hype for this book-- just picked it out based on description. I loved the plot, the intensity of the pace, and the engagement. I couldn't wait to get back to it. The characters are not particularly likable, but that's fine; they are every day people. No more, no less. Just regular. And this is a story about something catastrophic and mysterious happening to everyone. The pace is masterful. It rarely drops out of high speed, and as twists and turns drop, they aren't gimmicky or old. Just a nicely written thriller without a lot of blood.
Edit
Delete
Comment Permalink
Product Details

Leave the World Behind: A Novel
byRumaan Alam

Totally different than i thought it would be. Tis was such an interesting story. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher!