A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (Fiction)
A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher’s Lunch * LitHub * … Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher’s Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel 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.
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?
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This is the most perfectly claustrophobic read for our (end?) times right now. My favorite read of 2020, hands down.
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.
I want to say I loved this book, and in many (most?) ways I did, but there were more than a few moments I found frustrating. It’s a hard book to recommend because readers are likely to either be enthralled by it or hate it. There’s not much room for middle ground with this one.
The plot enticed me—Clay and Amanda, a middle-income white couple with two children rent a rural luxury home on Long Island for vacation. Not long into their stay they lose power, internet, TV—but not before getting a few jumbled hints that something terrible has happened. Something big.
In the middle of the night, G.H. and Ruth, an older, wealthy black couple arrive claiming they are the owners of the home, and that there has been a massive blackout in New York City. How these two couples react to each other, their relationship changing as it becomes more and more apparent something more than a blackout has taken place, is the foundation of the story.
Although I found this book hard to put down, there were moments that amounted to fingernails on my reading blackboard. As an example, near the beginning we get at least two pages listing what Amanda bought at the grocery store. What writer gets away with that? What editor lets it slide past? Then there are the sometimes-crude passages focused on Clay or Amanda thinking about sex. I’m not prudish, but some was just…gross. Thankfully, those passages weren’t long, but I found it weird how the author veered in that direction multiple times.
Honestly, the whole book is weird. Strange. Odd. Curious. Bizarre, and atypical.
And yet it’s compelling. Riveting. There is a commanding sense of urgency as well as a building atmosphere of claustrophobia throughout.
The story is told from an omniscient point-of-view, with insight into all the characters, even the two kids, Rose, a thirteen-year-old and Archie, a sixteen-year-old. Every now and then—as the reader is experiencing what a character is feeling at a particular moment—the author inserts something unrelated. A tragic happening to someone the reader doesn’t know, in another part of the country. These “glimpses” which only last a few sentences, are never fully fleshed out, but serve to heighten the need to know exactly what catastrophic event took place. The reader is as much in the dark (no pun intended) as Clay and Amanda, G.H. and Ruth.
Of particular note, there are a few moments that I considered sheer brilliance and which made the hair prickle on the back of my neck—when Rose spies thousands of deer that suddenly appear in the woods. When a huge flock of flamingos land on the in-ground pool (you have to read the book to understand why this is so eerie) and most of all, “the noise.”
Many reviewers felt this book was poorly written. I disagree. There are passages weighted down in telling (Amanda’s grocery list, anyone?), but the passages related to the noise (and there are many) were so vividly and expertly described, I felt as if that horrific happening had reached through my Kindle and echoed in my ears. Pages upon pages of goosebumps!
Finally, we come to the ending. Or lack of one.
I know that infuriated many readers. I actually swiped back through my Kindle thinking I must have missed a few pages. Then all I could think was “huh?” But the more I dwelled on how the author chose to wrap things up, the more I was okay with it. I really hope this book is optioned for the big screen as I can see it making an excellent movie (although I’m sure many movie-goers would be frustrated by the ending).
So… is it a good book? Yes. Is it a bad book? Yes.
Did I like it?
After ruminating for a few days, I can fully see myself reading Leave the World Behind again when I want something unusual. A curious, sometimes annoying, but fully engrossing story. I started this review with “I want to say I loved this book.” Quibbles and problems aside, I thoroughly loved it. Guaranteed, should you give it a go, you’re bound to have a strong opinion one way or the other.
Every so often you come across one of those books that really sticks with you. Days after finishing this, when I walk outside I look at the sky. Just in case something is happening. This book is about a family who rents an Air B&B home in a secluded area of New York, and then opens the door one night to a middle-aged couple who claim to be the owners. They have come home after a black out in the city. But did they really? Or are they someone else? And if it was a black out – why? This was a page turner and I couldn’t put it down. I was just as flummoxed as the family until the last page. I am still thinking about it.
This novel really scared me — not like a horror story or a supernatural story — it scared me because it quickly took the characters from a quiet mundane life to a totally changed life but they didn’t know what had caused the changes and what was going on in the world.
Amanda and Clay and their two children live in New York City and rented a house in an isolated area – near the ocean but actually in the middle of nowhere. The house is beautiful and they settle in to have a great week as a family. Until the second night…when there is a knock on the door after dark. No one they know – but who was it? It turned out to be the older couple who owned the house they were staying in. They were out for dinner when the power went off in New York City so instead of going to their high rise apartment where the elevators and air conditioning wouldn’t be working, they decided to drive to their vacation home to see if they could stay there until the power went back on. But were they who they said they were??? The power was still on in the vacation home but the television, phones and laptops no longer worked. Amanda and Clay let the owners stay for what they planned to be one night and then the world started to go wrong – no one really knew what was wrong but it just wasn’t right. As the four adults and two children try to discover what is going on, things just keep getting worse. Amanda and Clay want to keep their families safe but they don’t know if they are safe from the owners of the house and they aren’t sure if they should stay or try to go home. Suspenseful and provocative this 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. The book was full of tension, lack of trust and claustrophobia from being trapped in the house with strangers.
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.
The. Ending was horrible. You never found out what caused the problem. Not worth reading. I have put this author on my do not read list.
Not my cup of tea. I found this book to be rather boring. I kept waiting for something to happen but found that the entire book focuses on character development with very little real action and only hints of what has led to the current crisis that the characters are facing.
Well now I know why Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam has such mixed reviews, it is a strange one! I don’t know what just happened but… I liked it? This book is unlike anything I have read before and it was incredibly unique while also being very odd. The author only gives you a vague idea of what is going on in the outside world, and the main focus is definitely on the adults in the house. Alam used a lot of words I had never heard of before, so I had to spend a bit of time Googling. It was fairly short at less than 300 pages, but at the same time feels pretty wordy if that makes sense. A person could quite easily get a book hangover from all these words, some of which feel quite pretentious.
I feel like Leave the World Behind in itself is hard to explain, and you kind of have to experience it for yourself. I had the audiobook as well as a Book of the Month copy, and I would highly recommend sticking to the audio. The narrator, Marin Ireland, did a really great job and I literally finished the entire thing in one sitting. It is quirky, interesting, and I enjoyed the way the viewpoints were written but its ambiguous nature wasn’t my favorite.
This is my second book by this author and I’m not sure if I will pick up another of his. I rated this and Rich and Pretty three stars, and while that means I still enjoyed it, I probably won’t be jumping on his next book. That being said, I definitely recommend checking it out for yourself if it sounds good to you since there are a lot of great reviews. It’s a character study to be sure, and it’s also thought-provoking and ominous so there are definitely positives if you like and appreciate Alam’s writing style!
Thank you to Libro.fm and the publisher for my advance listening copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.
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: ℎ ℎ
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: 241
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: 10/6/2020
: (4.5 stars)
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This is the first book I’ve ever read from this author. I absolutely love this cover. This was one of my October #botm picks.
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: In this book we follow Amanda and Clay who head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation. A late night knock on the door stops everything. Ruth and G.H claim to own the home and have arrived in a panic. In my mind this was a beautifully written literary suspense novel with a few thriller vibes that creeped me out. This book brought race and other topics to the forefront, which were perfect for the time period that we live in. I was highly engaged throughout the entire book. The pacing of this book was spot on for the 241 pages that I read. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone because it is a genre bending novel combining literary fiction with suspensefulness. Make sure to pick up a copy of Leave The World Behind today!!!!!
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.
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.
You will want to read Leave the World Behind very quickly, you will want to read it very slowly and savor every word. Rumaan Alam’s ingenious, gorgeously written novel feels both like a prophecy and a contemporaneous response to our anxious era, all of it building to a perfect finale.
Rumaan Alam’s witty, incisive take on the American privileged classes has always been hilarious, but there’s a sinister shadow behind the satire in his latest book, as it becomes increasingly tense and unsettling. Alam has achieved a rare feat—a comic novel that is also genuinely terrifying.
Here in your hands, wrapped in the delicious cloth of suspense, Leave the World Behind 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.
Alam has a tremendous talent for bringing the complexities of family tensions to life. In the confined space of a single home, this remarkable novel takes on some of the hardest questions of our time about class, race, and who we become in moments of growing uncertainty. In every eloquent scene, Alam reveals something new about what being a family means in the twenty-first century.
This novel left me tense, overwhelmed, and bristling with admiration. Rumaan Alam is a brilliant writer, a beautiful prose stylist with an uncanny talent for drawing characters—both their individual quirks and foibles, and the subtle gradations of class and circumstance. In this novel he combines those gifts with absolutely superb pacing and atmospheric control, balancing the comic and the tragic, the real and the surreal, the cynical and the empathetic, the individual and the collective. I’m blown away by this novel.
It was interesting until it became a very hard read. Haunting ending.
This is such a realistic portrayal of how we deal (or don’t deal) with uncertainty.
very disappointed with the ending. I.E there was no ending. really odd. considering i was turning pages to get the good bit, I never got there