In the dead of night, the vacation is interrupted by a knock on the front door from an older Black couple who claim to be the owners of the house.
But Leave the World Behind never stops throwing curveballs-and fire balls, asteroids, wild flamingos, pretty much everything. Alam is such a gifted writer, with an uncanny ear for the ironies, fantasies, and trivialities that make up modern family life, he could have paused the plot right there and built a terrific novel out of his wry observations. Is it the end of the world? Or a regional blackout? A hurricane? An atomic bomb laced with nerve gas? The planet finally exacting its revenge for centuries of abuse? Or maybe it’s just a temporary glitch in a satellite overhead? Rumaan Alam’s ravishing, ravaging new novel Leave the World Behind starts out with calmly enough, with an upper-middle-class white family (wife, husband, older teenage son, younger teenage daughter) from New York City Airbnb-ing a gorgeous country house tucked in the woods on the southern tip of Long Island.
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