Leave The World Behind: A Novel

"If I had to choose one novel for readers of the future to help them understand what it was like to live through 2020, I’d choose Leave the World Behind. A slippery and duplicitous marvel, Rumaan Alam’s story opens on the domestic bickering of a family vacation car trip. It quickly takes on aspects of both a suspense story and a witty comedy of manners about race. Very slowly, it morphs into a vision of disaster that both the characters and we readers keep denying. Atmospheric and prescient, Alam’s novel captures the rhythms of how we live right now."

"It does continue this theme of precariousness. Leave the World Behind , is about two couples stuck together. A white couple with kids rent a vacation home. Something terrible happens in the world. The roads are closed, so the owners come home. They are stuck sheltering together. The plot makes it a great pandemic novel. It feels topical. Though there are no South Asians in the book, the author is South Asian. Rumaan doesn’t lean into his identity. Here’s a Bangladeshi American inhabiting the lives of an elderly Black couple and a white couple. He is gay, but both these couples are heterosexual. I’m curious about the question: Do writers always have to write about their people? Can they inhabit other lives? When is it appropriation? You can see it. I grew up in multicultural California. I had Punjabi friends, Sikh friends, Hindu friends. But at Berkeley, when I was walking with a Hindu friend from home, another friend who was Hindu, told us that when he was growing up and brought a Muslim friend home, his grandmother said: ‘Why do you bring a warmonger to our house?’ Those tensions that you see in India, with the rise of Hindu nationalism, got exported to America. In my late twenties, divisions among South Asians became more pronounced. A lot of my Indian Hindu friends confessed that their parents hate Muslims or that their dads told them they could bring home anyone but a Pakistani. It was a simmering tension, then the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and violent Muslim extremism in Pakistan turned up the heat. Both India and Pakistan are nurturing extremism; that influences American-born desis."