Leave the World Behind

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: 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 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 holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another? 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. Review 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 WeatherRumaan 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 HandLeave 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 PartiesSuspenseful 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 LakeHere 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 About the Author 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.