The Vox Book Club has tapped Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind as its latest selection.
Alam’s 2020 book, about a family whose vacation on Long Island is interrupted by a mysterious and dire national emergency, was among last year’s most celebrated books. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote, “Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam’s novel is just in time for this moment.” The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Constance Grady of Vox called the book “the perfect accompaniment for a vacation of your own. With any luck at all, yours can’t go any worse than the one you’ll be reading about.”
Alam wrote the novel before the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world, and forced billions into lockdown. In an interview with the Paris Review, Alam said the timing of the book’s publication was “a strange coincidence.”
“The fact that I fixed on the metaphor of isolation and the device of people trapped in a house, without knowing that we, American readers, would all be people trapped in our houses, was just an accident of timing,” he said. “But the novel is also grappling with things that I think have been in the cultural atmosphere for a long time.”
The Vox Book Club was launched in April 2020, and previous selections have included Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham and Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
