Leave The World Behind

I was expecting to love this. Was so excited to read it...with all the hype about the soon to be movie/series...and I am loving post apocalyptic thrillers at the moment.

Unfortunately I really struggled...the beginning few chapters were page after page of analogies with similes and metaphors thrown in...so very many...it was almost unreadable at times....and they didn't even make sense! A few made me cringe and a few made me laugh. Not everything needs to be described that way...I get what a car is...I get what teenagers are like. It was just so unnecessary and so overwhelming! Just because you can use a metaphor...doesn't mean you should and I have never read so many in such a short space of time!

There was alot of description about small everyday things and so little about the story itself.

There were parts of the story that were fascinating but these parts were never fully explored and I found that frustrating. I understand the lack of information was part of the way the story was told but the over description of some aspects was in such contrast to the lack of description to the interesting aspects of the story.

To say we spent alot of time with these characters...I never fully understood, liked or related to them...which was a shame. Whatever lengths it went to to state otherwise, it was clear Amanda and Clay were wealthy. Not necessarily Hamptons elite but well enough off. To try and describe them as not seemed disingenuous.

I absolutely hated the ending. I don't want to put any spoilers so I can't say any more.

I can actually see a movie working very well...but the book itself didn't quite work for me.

Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Well. I'm really struggling to clarify what I actually thought about this book. I was really looking forward to reading it - the premise is incredible! - but the actual reading experience wasn't as great as I was hoping. While I was reading it, I was glued to it, despite some overblown prose and images I could have done without (the yoga penis stands out here. Please, just no) but I felt kind of dissatisfied when I had finished it. I just wanted more from it - more creepiness, more answers as to what was actually going on. The ending in particular felt very abrupt and rushed.

I really liked the premise of this book, and I found it incredibly tense with a few genuine shocking moments.

However I did find a lot of the language in the novel to be a bit ridiculous at times, and the sexual language and odd and unnecessary (also vaguely sexual) descriptions of the young children's bodies was really off putting and spoiled my enjoyment of the book. Some of the language was really eye-rollingly bad! I also found a lot of the dialogue to be completely unbelievable and clunky. This definitely took away from what was otherwise a tense and thought=provoking novel.

Some reviewers didn't like the somewhat abrupt and ambiguous ending - however I felt this worked well in the context of the book and I thought was much better than a neatly tied-up conclusion, which wouldn't have worked so well for me.

Drawn in by the stunning cover and premise, I was intrigued by Leave the World Behind. But I think I went in with the wrong expectations and was thereby disappointed.
This starts off as a domestic read. We follow a white family going to vacation at a beautiful home in the middle of the woods outside of New York City. They’ve rented it via Airbnb. A relaxing holiday is interrupted by the arrival of the owners, who’ve returned following a blackout in the city. The owners are black. They move into the basement after they promise the family that they’ll get half their refund back for putting up with the intrusion. And uncertainty to the situation means the family remain stuck together for longer...
I think I thought this would be a literary fiction blend of psychological drama, like Little Fires Everywhere. Instead this book is actually a dystopian literature read. Personally I felt the author spreads himself thin attempting to dissect far too many themes and does justice to neither. Instead we get a convoluted mess. It doesn’t help that the characters have no idea what it happening therefore neither does the reader. The writing is atrociously purple with cringeworthy sex scenes. I’m afraid this didn’t work for me.

This was such a unique dystopian novel that was very eerie and I flew through very quickly! And the ending I was like whatttt

A 3 star read for me!
I love the premise of this book and some big social issues were well discussed and developed including race, wealth and privilege. It hooked me from the very beginning but I was almost shocked at the ending which just felt abrupt! The writing is very clever, but almost too clever and hard to decipher which character point of view we were getting at some points.

There is an eerie foreboding in this book. Something has happened, and at a few points in the book the author drops out a little bit of information, but all throughout the book you are left wondering what has happened, if anything.

This book makes you feel disquieted all the way through, and leaves you thinking - how would we cope? What would we do? Would we going screaming towards the supposed danger, or screaming from it?

Would we just give up, or would we face the challenge? I wanted the characters to be more proactive and to find out more, so I guess that means I personally would want to face the challenge. Who knows what they would really do though!

An interesting read.

I enjoyed the start of this book and found it interesting how the two families came together and imagined what I would do in their situation - would I let a stranger in just because they said it was their house?
I could feel the dread that the families felt not knowing what was going on in the outside world and I could relate to the mothers in the book.
Overall I enjoyed it - it’s not normally the sort of book that I would read but I had heard so much about it that I thought I would try it.

A ridiculously readable and sharply observed thriller - some readers may be frustrated by the equivocal nature of the catastrophe, but I found the atmosphere of creeping, ambiguous dread very effective. The pasta recipe is great, too.

Amanda and Clay are middle aged white New Yorkers (Brooklyn, natch) who Airb’n’b a house upstate for a holiday with their early teenaged kids, Archie and Rose. It’s hot, the house has a pool, mobile phones don’t work but the shop down the road stocks some good, although expensive, supplies. Plus, they’re on holiday! Time to treat themselves a bit.

Early on in their stay, a knock at the door and it’s an older, well dressed Black couple – GH Washington and his wife, Ruth. They introduce themselves as the landlords, explain that something happened in New York City and they’d like to stay while they sort themselves out.

It’s an interesting premise, and one which perhaps could have been wrapped up in a short story – not that it’s particularly long at 250ish pages – but you would have lost the quietly increasing tension and the growing sense of dread that comes through the pages.

All of the characters get a say, you hear what they all think of what’s happening (or not) and this I’d say is one of the criticisms I have – they weren’t different enough and sometimes I found myself checking who was talking – was it Ruth, or Rose? Clay or Archie? Amanda or GH?

It’s a subtle exploration of unconscious bias, from all of the characters. Amanda is suspicious of the older couple, with oblique and direct references to their skin colour. While that is unacceptable, it was easy to imagine what I would do in that situation – I might be suspicious too, strangers turning up in the middle of the night in your holiday home due to a mystery ‘event’. They clearly know what’s in the house and have keys to the locked cupboards, so the 60 year olds aren’t staging a home invasion. Similarly though, Ruth is uncomfortable with strangers in their house, and judges them for their dirty dishes and lack of clothing. To be honest, I thought it was a bit weird too, but I guess that’s an indication of where there thoughts are in this weird limbo.

There have been some comparisons to Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, “Get Out” in this, where Daniel Kaluuya’s character visits his girlfriend’s super liberal parents with horrific results. I can see the comparison, but I also saw a lot of his 2019 film, “Us” – holiday homes, white people drinking white wine, different people laying claim to a life, to property. They don’t know what happened, but they might not be able to return to New York. What then? They share the house forever, pool resources?

I enjoyed reading this – I liked the prose even though sometimes it was over stylised. I wanted to know more about the characters, even though I didn’t like any of them, really. I also liked that it specifically didn’t do what I dislike in books – when the plot talks of that Big Thing that happened a Long Time Ago. It basically did the opposite, because as the reader you get to know little future flash forwards on what happens to that character or that place, even though they don’t know it yet. I liked being in on the details, sharing the story glory.

I am also not surprised that it’s been sold to Netflix to be adapted and directed by Sam Esmail, who also created Homecoming, and Dr Robot. With Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts in starring roles (presumably as GH and Amanda), it looks to be shaping up to be interesting.

Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury for the DRC – this book is available to buy now from all good bookshops.

This took me a while to get into - Alam has a unique writing style (for me) and it’s very slow pace. But it started to get under my skin with its uneasiness and creepiness. There’s great examination into many themes; race, class, family, youth, isolation, dependency on modern tech, and they’re all done with a leisurely pace. But it’s during these moments that Alam will throw in an unsettling moment that turns up the creep factor. This is a short read and I would have enjoyed a longer read with more creep. (Does that make me twisted?) I really felt Bird Box vibes with this read and similarly I’ll be looking forward to the Netflix adaptation.

I love that book and I've been recommended it it to everybody who asks (or not). Understated yet powerful, simple yet effective it left me in tatter.

The language is beautiful and I've rarely seen an author being able to create such an unsettling atmosphere with so few words.

Loved it.

Slow to start and then it hits you in the face like a ton of bricks!
I loved this will they/won't they style, such an interesting pretence for a novel, will definitely be hand selling this a lot this year.

Leave The World Behind left me totally unsatisfied and confused. I just didn't understand the point of it at all. From the synopsis it sounded like it would be action packed and creepy but it wasn't either of those. 99% of the book was build up and I just spent the entire time waiting for things to notch up and for something to ACTUALLY HAPPEN! Because literally, NOTHING happened in the entire book.
A family rent a cabin from another couple for the week but one night the owners turn up and tell the family that something major is happening, possibly something apocalyptic, and that they need to stay in the cabin to protect themselves. The TV stations and internet are initially reporting something seeming to start but then everything goes dead and there's no way to find out what's actually happening. I normally absolutely love apocalyptic books so I was really, really excited to read this book but once I started reading it I was just really, really excited for it to end so I could read something else! There was almost zero plot along with an abundance of verbose, never ending writing. Why use 10 words when you can use 100 right? And why the author felt the need to refer to characters' genitalia so frequently I have no idea, especially the childrens' genitals.
Overall, not the book for me at all. If anyone was considering reading this book my advice would be to Leave The Book Behind!

I really enjoyed Leave The World Behind, and found it quite captivating. How prescient to read a tale of what appears to be global devastation at a time like this. Almost Carveresque with its economical descriptions, it was atmospheric and beguiling. This would appeal to fans of of DeLillo's White Noise and I will definitely be recommending it.

This book was well written, however, I did feel like there was a lot of build up, and I found the ending to ultimately be unsatisfying. This may be one for other readers

“She walked down the steps onto the damp grass and the deer just watched her, barely curious. She hadn’t even seen that there was another beside it – no more…
…Had she been up higher, she’d have understood that there were hundreds, more than a thousand, more than that, even.”

Never has a description of deer been so utterly terrifying.

This is the first of Rumaan Alam's novels that I have read, and it had me feeling tense, terrified and thrilled all at once, in a way I found simply mind-blowing. For me this is a masterpiece and I will definitely be reading more of his work.

In Leave The World Behind, we meet Amanda, Clay and their two children Rosie and Archie (I’m not sure that we ever know their surname). A wonderful, vivid sense of place is established from the very first chapter, which paints such a detailed picture of a family of four in a car. We’re seeing who they are as a family, how they think, their reliance on technology and being connected, the state of their car, their smells, in just a few pages. It’s just them in their own bubble off on holiday to a big house in remote part of Long Island. And it starts off so well “Well the sun was shining, they felt that boded well…”

My my what a false sense of security, because reading back, I think this is perhaps a teaser to the way in which the author builds a whole unsettling world - outwards from the shelter of a safe ‘bubble’ which later takes the form of a lavish, isolated, AirBnB rental home. We like the central characters, spend the rest of the novel fearful of and questioning everything else outside of that boundary. The turning point is a knock on the door late into the evening, and the arrival of two strangers.

One of the things I loved most about this book was the beautiful conflict between a sense of urgency and stillness throughout which is also reflected in the vivid and evocative prose. This has us the reader viewing characters, their actions, and human nature through a microscopic lens and really builds the tension throughout. It will leave you hungry for more and racing through chapter after chapter.

Amanda and Clay are very real characters, and amidst an unnerving backdrop I felt the author interwove and explored themes of parenthood, racism, classism, relationships, and our reliance on technology in the modern world, really well.

What is happening and who can be trusted all remain to be seen.

Oh my goodness.....this book is brilliant. Tense, scary and disturbing. A family take a holiday in remote part of Long Island, but after an unknown 'event' in the city, the Black owners of the house arrive one evening, seeking help. This turns everything on its head and despite not knowing what has happened, we go on the terrifying journey alongside the novel's characters. It's a thrilling, dystopian vision of the future. I urge you to read it.

I hate to not finish a title but I just couldn't get on with this I'm sorry to say. I know others who have read it, said to stick with it and, while I had a sense of foreboding in the build up, it was just too slow moving for me. I was over half halfway and it hadn't moved on enough to keep me hooked. Thank you for the opportunity to read a digital copy, I shall perhaps revisit at a later time.

“Leave the World Behind” is a strange and alarming novel that forces the reader to wonder about the individual and collective responses towards the unknown. A white middle-class couple, Amanda and Clay, and their two children are vacationing in a remote Airbnb, when an older black couple who owns the house arrives unexpectedly one evening looking for shelter. Something is happening, but the information is not available, instead, the fear of a mysterious event, some sort of inevitable catastrophe, starts looming over everyone’s heads. We follow people battling their own fears, prejudices and instincts as they face an unknown danger. The tone of the book is gripping and unsettling, the author hints constantly about the great catastrophe as we get glimpses of the people and nature reacting to it. He lets the readers into characters heads, showing us how the individuals react towards the situation and ways in which people deal with them. A powerful and disturbing picture of the world not dissimilar to the one we live in, “Leave the World Behind” is a story that hits close to home and leaves the reader disturbed and spooked.