I read the book in one sitting, and have thought of it every day since.

And a desperate noise that ripples through the characters’ shared home (and maybe around the world), making the unknown all the more terrifying. Things get weirder all the time: Thousands of deer in the woods by the house. But Alam captures the surreal normalcy of life in a crisis the jarring juxtaposition of moments of mysterious horror alongside long afternoons spent slicing Brie for poolside sandwiches.

When I picked up Leave the World Behind, I had reservations. It’s precisely the kind of story I’ve sworn to avoid since the beginning of the pandemic-those involving disease, death, mass catastrophe, mysterious sources of doom and/or the apocalypse. In cutting detail, Alam moves between all the characters’ private thoughts on race, privilege, class and survival, revealing the lies they tell each other both to encourage a sense of calm and to protect their own insecurities. Which is exactly what it’s like to live through an evolving crisis, as we all well know. “Whatever they thought they’d understood was not wrong but irrelevant.” “The world operated according to logic, but the logic had been evolving for some time, and now they had to reckon with that,” Alam writes as the families begin to realize their reality is slipping away. Stripped of all the usual ways of communicating with the outside world, the four adults and two children are left with only each other and their festering anxieties. Alam’s novel, which will become a Netflix film starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, traces two families stranded together in a remote Long Island house during a mysterious power outage that sweeps New York. That sense of uncertainty and isolation, familiar to so many of us in the pandemic era, lies at the center of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, one of the most anticipated books of the fall and a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction.

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