Genre: Contemporary / Mystery
Book Type: Audio
Author: Rumaan Alam
Narrator: Marin Ireland
Pages / Length: 256 pages / 7 hours and 26 minutes
Publisher: Ecco (Octover 6, 2020) / Harper Audio
Book Description:
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel 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.
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 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 other?
Thoughts: I’m not sure what I just read. I feel the same way I did when I finished Normal People and realize these books are not for me. While I appreciate the dynamics of the story and think I understand the message the author was trying to portray, it fell very flat for me. There were moments I’d stop and think about what was said, but most of the time I was scratching my forehead wondering what the point was and where the book was going. It was oddly sexual, in a way that was also confusing and pointless. I know there was a lot of hype around this one, but it fell short for me. Had I not done the audio and been able to increase the speed, it may have been a DNF.
Favorite Quotes:
*** Some quotes towards the end may be considered spoilers. ***
🌃 He had not realized how much light connoted safety, and how much dark its opposite. (Page 65)
🌃 Sometimes distance showed a thing most clearly. (Page 69)
🌃 Every couple apportioned labor by strength, even or especially at such moments. Her role was to shake hands and make nice and put these people at ease so they could get what they wanted…
[…]
Amanda took the strangers, manicured hand. If calluses meant, honest labor, did softness imply dishonesty? (Page 39)
🌃 Fear was private. It was primal. It was something you guarded because you thought you could defuse it that way. How could they continue to love each other, having realized that they could not save each other? No one person could stop a determined terrorist or the gradual change in the oceans' pH. The world was lost, and there was nothing that Clay or Amanda could do about it, so why discuss?
In other words: The world was over, so why not dance? The morning would come, so why not sleep? And end was inevitable, so why not drink, eat, enjoy the moment, whatever contained? (Page 169-170)
🌃 This woman was not a stranger at all; she was their salvation.
[…]
She wanted to know that her child and her child and her grandchildren were safe, but of course, Ruth would never know that. You never know that. You demanded answers, but the universe refused. Comfort and safety were just an illusion. Money meant nothing. All that meant anything was this-people, in the same place, together. This was what was left to them. (Page 222)
🌃 People disappointed. He would do better. They would still be good, kind, human, decent, together, safe. (Page 232)
🌃 If they didn't know how it would end-with night, with more terrible noise from the top of Olympus, with bombs, with disease, with blood, with happiness, with deer or something else watching them from the darkened woods-well, wasn't that true of every day? (Page 241)
Rating: ⭐️
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