Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: 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 black 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 cell 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 vacation home, isolated from civilization, 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.

I’m not entirely sure where to start with my review of Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, but I have enough thoughts that I wanted to dedicate a full length post to it. I don’t tend to read reviews of books I haven’t read, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pick this one up and therefore ended up going down a rabbit hole of reviews. And it was really mixed, including from people whose thoughts tend to match mine. So I decided to go for it – why not? And I got my mind blown.

Not your typical thriller

As others have said, definitely don’t go into it expecting a typical thriller. I don’t really read thrillers, but I can definitely say that this is way more on the literary side. It reads quickly because of the writing style, but it’s otherwise a slowly plotted book. It’s a book that’s meant to unsettle you, to slowly creep under your skin. A lot of people said they felt that sense of unease very prominently. I personally did not. I think the writing style felt quite distant, even though it flows in and out of different characters’ heads, and I often felt like I was being told to feel uneasy rather than letting the words make me feel it. I liken this slow, creeping unease to the feeling of the slow approach of impending disaster – such as global warming, or capitalism.

The plot gets weird

Like I hinted at, the book isn’t very plot driven. A friend who read it after me even commented that she was amazed by how much was covered in only 24, or maybe 48, hours. The novel is more like a meditative book, and I think it’s more enjoyable if you take your time with it and think your way through it a little bit. I sped through the exposition in the beginning, but about halfway through the book, I started jotting down some thoughts and connections I was making, as well as noting some quotes that stuck out to me. Later on, I was discussing with a different friend about the book, and when I mentioned how writing out my thoughts probably helped me to think about the book more broadly and dig deeper and is probably why I understood the brilliance of the ending, she said she might have felt that way too, if she had done the same.

There are parts of the book that are…weird, to say the least. It reminded me of parts of Sorry to Bother You or Parasite after the plot twists in those movies. None of it is totally explained, but I think it adds to the atmosphere and that sense of strangeness, of not knowing what’s going on, of fear, etc. It also feeds into questions of animal instincts and survival vs. our own. I think the point is to not totally understand it, to accept it. I will say, the sections where a character’s teeth fall out were the parts that got the most shivers out of me. It was the most vivid part of the book, perhaps because I had pretty vivid dreams of my teeth falling out after I got my wisdom teeth removed…

Characters, race, and class

The book also isn’t very character driven. Writing this review about 1.5 months after reading the book, I recall the vague outlines of the characters, but they don’t really stick in my mind. As mentioned, we do go in and out of characters’ heads, so I found that I really had to read the book and not listen to the audiobook. Physically seeing the paragraph breaks helped me to make sense of the shifts, whereas it’s very hard to follow as an audiobook. Like the writing style of the book overall, some of the dialogue, both internal and external, is quite weird and uncomfortable. Additionally, contrary to the way it’s marketed, I really don’t think it says that much about race and class. It remains at a fairly superficial level, except that there are ways that the characters’ reactions, actions, choices, and fears are inflected by it. If anything, I think book asks the reader to consider what matters in the face of disaster.

A deeply thought-provoking read

This leads me to the aspects of the book that most impacted me. The book is brilliant at making you consider who you are and what you do during times of crisis or (looming) disaster. How do we think we react to disaster? How do we really react? What parts of every day life continue in the midst of fear and catastrophe? How much do we cling to a sense of denial? What becomes important? Who do we become, and who do we keep around us? How do we find comfort? How do kids vs. adults react? How much do we ever really know? How do we rationalize that which we don’t understand? Where do we get information, and who do we trust to give us that information? Why? Who do we expect to act? What do the people who survive/make it out leave behind?

These are only some of the questions that came to me, and I don’t think the book seeks to answer all of it. But it asks the reader, if they can see it, to dwell on these things. And then I think the writing insinuates that earth-shattering, life-changing events and disasters have already occurred and are occurring. Disaster can come at any time, and the future is always unpredictable. Catastrophe is already here, and those experiences shape who they are, how they interact with others, how they carry with them what they had to do to survive, and what they had to leave behind.

The mind-blowing, brilliant ending

And I think the end of the book, although seemingly abrupt, makes so much sense if you think about it with this lens. I thought it was brilliant, and it wrapped things up in some ways and left other things open to interpretation. The story doesn’t fully end, just like these events continue to happen and are messy and are inexplicable. I can’t get it out of my head. I haven’t felt this way about a book and its ending since Slaughterhouse Five. For most of the book, I was sure I was going to give Leave the World Behind 3 stars, 3.5 stars at most, but then once I read the last chapter, that made the book one of the best books I’ve read in a while. I was literally mind. blown.

Final thoughts

Leave the World Behind isn’t a book for everyone, and even though I loved it, I would not recommend it to everyone. I get excited whenever I find someone else who liked it, even if for different reasons. You’ll be disappointed if you go into it expecting a usual thriller. But I hope that if you choose to read it, you’ll get your mind blown too. I’ll let you know when I stop thinking about this book.