We review Rumaan Alam’s extraordinary novel, Leave The World Behind, telling the story of two couples’ interactions with each other as the world around them ends. The book is available for purchase here.
Rumaan Alam’s third novel Leave The World Behind is a startlingly prescient story about the end of the world and the interactions between two couples navigating the unknown. Alam wrote the novel before the crisis and unwittingly captured all the complexity of emotions universal to the human experience of 2020. The magic in the novel is how precise and thoughtful Alam in his writing, he does not waste a word or storyline.
The story follows Amanda and Clay as they take their children to a Long Island holiday house. Barely a night into the holiday, a black couple – George and his wife Ruth – knock on the door of their house. It transpires that they are the owners of the house and have escaped a city-wide blackout in New York – the phones, internet and TV are down. The story unfolds as the couples interact amidst the crisis, isolated in the country with no news of the events transpiring into the city, navigating waves of intimacy, trust, mistrust, hatred and love as the narrator interjects with what the couples do not know about the terrifying events unfolding globally that the couples are unaware of.
Alam manages to subtly weave through fears of racism, technology, climate change and social issues in this extraordinary novel, navigating fear, optimism, pessimism and even hope. Leave The World Behind is a book that sticks with you, leaving you haunted, satisfied and dissatisfied in equal measure. It is a novel that more than anything makes you feel.
