The initial 24 hours show the family switching from real life to holiday mode: mother Amanda tries to stop looking at her work emails, she buys fancy foods at the local deli, gets drunk, has loud sex with her husband. The plot sees an all-American family – white, middle class, two children, a boy and a girl – rent an Airbnb in a remote part of Long Island, “at least an hour from East Hampton”, the closest we get to co-ordinates. You feel as if the terrible things in this book could happen tomorrow. If this novel can be categorised as science fiction, it is in the most literal sense: Alam has made up a story that has its basis in science and reality. An emotionally resonant read, it taps into our age of anxiety and confirms the worst. Set over a few days of a family’s holiday on Long Island, it explores issues of race, class and identity in the face of overwhelming disaster. Leave the World Behind covers a multitude in a short space of time.

In his third novel, the American author Rumaan Alam creates an atmosphere of dread so convincing and prescient that it stays with the reader long after reading. This beautifully paced story about a sudden and catastrophic unknown event lures the reader into a tale of sun, sea and holidaymaking before ripping the beach towel from under us to leave us shivering on the shore alone. That was the nature of the noise it was horror, in some distilled way, in a single, very brief moment.” “If the noise returned, say tonight, once the sun had set – once the profound dark of the farmland all around them asserted itself – he wouldn’t survive it.

Leave the world behind book