Leave the World Behind by  Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind

Rumaan Alam

A compelling read, fuelled by uncertainty and a multiplying sense of dread, this is end of the world via Airbnb. A family from Brooklyn hope to spend a week getting away from it all in a remote Long Island holiday home when an unnamed, unknown, cataclysmic event occurs. Smartphones remain dead, and in the resulting void of information, unease shifts to terror. A seductive nightmare of a book, both surreal and disturbingly plausible.

Extract

There it was, undeniable: noise. A cough, a voice, a step, a hesitation, that uncategorizable animal knowledge that there’s another of the species nearby and the pause, pregnant, to see if they mean harm. There was a knock at the door. A knock at the door of this house, where no one knew where they were, not even the global positioning system, this house near the ocean but also lost in farmland, this house of red bricks painted white, the very material the smartest little piggy chose because it would keep him safest. There was a knock at the door.

Parallels
  • Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
  • White Noise by Don DeLillo
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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Violence
Explicit sexual content