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“The notion that our institutions are less stable than we thought, in the UK, in the US, around the world – this moment is longer than we want to believe. But what we are experiencing now is part of a bigger moment, there has been a feeling of discomfort for a while,” Alam says. “I couldn’t see that the chosen metaphor – isolation inside the domestic space – would become our reality. Leave the World Behind has already been optioned by Netflix with Julia Roberts set to play Amanda who, anxious and babbling in her uselessness, blurts out: “You know, you look a little like Denzel Washington,” to GH, who will be played by Denzel Washington. We’ve always needed to know.”Īs the author of a book about people trapped inside a house by a huge event, desperate for information, Alam is a curious prophet. “We just want to be told what to do and when we aren’t, it is scary. But this is what makes Leave the World Behind so frightening: “Our need to know stems from us as a species always looking for authority, for answers, for leaders – for parents, fundamentally,” Alam says. Like much in the novel, the noise is never explained.

You could fairly say that their lives could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after.”

Late one night, there is a knock at the door of their Airbnb: GH and Ruth, the elderly black owners of the house, have just witnessed a mysterious power outage in New York and could they please come inside? Then comes the sound: “You didn’t hear such a noise you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it. Clay, a professor and critic who “wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything”, is on holiday on Long Island with his wife Amanda, an executive who “wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying”, and their children Archie and Rose.

W hen the end of the world arrives in Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam’s third novel, it comes not with a bang or a whimper, but a mysterious sound.