The author of two previous novels, Rich and Pretty (2016) and That Kind of Mother (2018), Alam’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. Alam attends to the contours of that uncertainty with devastating precision.Īt a time when focus has not come easily to me-my attention flickers restlessly between impossible headlines, bottomless news feeds, and the same four walls I have occupied since March-I was held still by the urgency, beauty, and uncanny familiarity of Alam’s world. And in a way, uncertainty itself becomes the novel’s primary subject.

Alam plays his cards close to the chest, explaining very little about the nature of the crisis. Overnight, the world becomes unrecognizable, and the strangers form a tense, unlikely union. The internet and phone service go out Archie comes down with a bad fever flamingos land in the swimming pool and the air is rent by a series of massive, deafening sounds. Over the next twenty-four hours, a series of terrifying and inexplicable events befall the household. Without giving too much away-Alam should teach a master class on the suspenseful withholding of information-the novel quickly spirals into something entirely different. It is an awkward, fraught moment that seems to set up a story about race and hypocrisy and misjudged expectations. They bring with them news that there has been a blackout in New York City, and, panicked, they have come to stay. But after a few indulgent days of hamburgers, sex, and drinking wine by the pool, the homeowners, a Black couple named G. H. The novel follows Amanda and Clay, a white couple from Brooklyn, who, following the seductive command of the novel’s title, go on vacation to a rural area on the East End of Long Island with their teenage children, Archie and Rose. This is not only because it centers around a group of people quarantined in a house together during a crisis (though it does), but because it offers a clear-eyed, if deeply unsettling, portrait of what emerges when our shared reality is bent, cracked, and forever altered. And yet it feels, in a way, like the first novel to be written about our new world. It was written before wildfires burned more than four million acres of the American West and before skies halfway across the globe were made blurry with smoke. It was written before the pandemic, the recession, and the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Leave the World Behind was written in the before times.

Rumaan alam