Leave the World Behind

Leave the World Behind
Rumaan Alam
RRP:
NZ$ 22.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 18.39
Paperback
h198 x 129mm - 256pg
1 Jun 2021 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781526633101
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
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. --Laura Lippman, author of Lady in the Lake
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. --Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties 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 Weather "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. " --Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew "Spectacular and ominous. . . . This illuminating social novel offers piercing commentary on race, class and the luxurious mirage of safety, adding up to an all-too-plausible apocalyptic vision. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) 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. --Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark 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. --Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State 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. "--Laura Lippman, author of Lady in the Lake "Alam shows an impressive facility for getting into his characters' heads and an enviable empathy for their moral shortcomings, emotional limitations, and failures of imagination. The result is a riveting novel that thrums with suspense yet ultimately offers no easy answers--disappointing those who crave them even as it fittingly reflects our time. Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam' s novel is just in time for this moment. "--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "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. " --Megan Abbott, author of Give Me Your Hand "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. "--Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will
Rumaan Alam is the author of Leave the World Behind, 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.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781526633101
Published: 1 Jun 2021
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Format: Paperback
Height: 198mm
Width: 129mm
Pages: 256

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