Book Review: Leave the World Behind

A Brooklyn-based middle-class family's vacation to Long Island goes sideways and dystopian in Rumaan Alam's prescient and unnerving Leave the World Behind. When Clay and Amanda, along with their children Archie and Rose, make their way to a luxurious home (booked via Airbnb for $340 a night, no less) for a brief summer idyll before getting back to their busy lives, little do they expect to be interrupted late in the night by a knock on the door. Turns out, it's the home's owners, a prosperous sixty-something Black couple, seeking refuge after a city-wide inexplicable blackout has rendered their 14th floor Manhattan high-rise apartment suddenly unsafe. With no cellular service, and TV and internet now down, the two families — utter strangers to one another — establish an uneasy truce, even as the crisis takes sinister detours. Alam's latest outing is less concerned with the mechanics of the apocalypse itself and even less preoccupied with providing concrete answers to the phenomena, alternately choosing to focus on the dynamics of race, class, and the families' need to find solace in each other and get acclimatised to the new normal. It's a novel that's by turns riveting, suspenseful, and thrums with an urgency that's all too real.