Leave the World Behind: 'The book of an era' Independent

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: 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 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 holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?

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.

An electrifying and unnerving novel for our times, Leave the World Behind elegantly captures our age of anxiety and shows how the most terrifying situations are never far from reality.

Rumaan Alam said: ‘Leave the World Behind was born of my desire to write about this political moment – about race, and class, and climate change and all its associated catastrophes – using the language of the domestic novel.’

“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