Summary and Reviews of Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (11):
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  • First Published:
  • Oct 6, 2020, 256 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Nov 2021, 320 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.

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?

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.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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By positioning his characters on the periphery of disaster, Alam is able to tap into the paranoia, denial, speculation and even the enduring boredom of domesticity that remain when society is on the brink of crumbling. It also makes clear that the point of the novel is not to try and understand "what's going on," but rather to observe the various ways each character responds to fear itself. Leave the World Behind begs to be debated, making it an ideal book club pick you'll be urging everyone to read...continued

Full Review (744 words)

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(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).

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Beyond the Book



When Dystopia Meets Mystery

With his novel Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam explores how a group of isolated strangers react to an unspecified threat that is sweeping across New York. By hinting at the disaster's cause and effect, but depriving both his characters and his readers of concrete answers, he is able to tap into our inherent fear of the unknown.

Though wholly original in tone and execution, the book is not the first to dip into the dystopian genre without providing wider context, using an apocalyptic setup as a springboard to explore the human response to fear itself. Here are a few other novels that take this same core notion in entirely different but equally fascinating directions.

I Who Have Never Known Men coverI Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
First ...

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Read-Alikes

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